Recent claims that IXPs "aren’t showing significant growth", that more interconnection is happening outside exchanges, and that peering can be more expensive than transit challenge long-standing assumptions about the role of IXPs. But do these claims hold up? A new paper from NAMEX explores the data.
When people talk about IXP decline, they often point to familiar metrics: member counts, port capacity, and year-on-year growth curves. In our new article, we argue that those signals are increasingly easy to misread, not because peering is shrinking, but because the interconnection market is changing shape.
We step back and ask a few basic questions: how has traffic evolved over the years, what is happening today, and what might future trends in peering growth look like? We also try to broaden the lens beyond Europe, because the story looks very different depending on where you are and how mature the local market is.
Some highlights to look out for in the paper
- Globally, the big picture is still growth - capacity keeps increasing, even if the pace is slower and the number of ASNs at IXPs dips slightly in some cases.
- In mature markets, "stagnation" can be a sign of a shift, not a crisis - we argue that what follows is often a diversification of services and participants, not the end of the IXP model.
- Membership and traffic don’t always move together - in the UK, for example, we include traffic figures from LINX and LONAP that help explain why "member counts" alone can be misleading.
- A regional example of "growth" - we discuss IX.br’s membership clean-up and why that kind of housekeeping can look like decline if you only watch one metric.
- Where markets are still emerging, growth can be very visible - we point to examples - including South Africa (capacity and peak traffic), Kenya, and Nigeria - to show what expansion looks like when the underlying conditions are supportive.
Our broader argument is simple: the peering market is not in decline, it is in transformation, and the value of IXPs is increasingly about resilience, locality, and serving a wider range of participants - not just chasing the biggest headline numbers.
If narratives about stalling IXPs have left you unsure what to believe, we hope the full paper helps. It’s designed to be read quickly, region by region, with enough context to understand what each graph can (and can’t) tell you.
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