Middle America Suffering From Scarcity of Interexchange Points: Experts
Too many areas in the middle of the U.S. lack the critical infrastructure they need, such as designated interexchange points (IXPs), said Tonya Witherspoon, a consultant who led digital transformation initiatives at Wichita State University (WSU). During a Broadband Breakfast webinar Wednesday, she said most of the nation’s IXPs are on the East and West Coasts or in more populous states like Texas. Policymakers so far have paid too little attention to the dearth of U.S. IXPs, other speakers agreed.
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Kansas formerly didn’t even have an IXP plan, Witherspoon said. “All of our network traffic backhauls out of the state,” she said. “That is just not going to work” for sectors including precision agriculture, smart manufacturing and telehealth, “the things that we need in our state.” As BEAD dollars are deployed and states build out last-mile facilities, “if we don’t have the first mile to connect to, the last mile isn’t going to help us.”
WSU is building a carrier-neutral IXP using $5 million in state funds, Witherspoon noted. “When we pop the IXP open, we’ll immediately have a lot of traffic” just from the students. The school is planning for four devices per student, since most bring with them a tablet, phone, computer and gaming device, she said. “They’re always on and streaming.”
Many community leaders don’t understand why they need better connections to IXPs if they already have broadband, Witherspoon said. “Not everybody is in the infrastructure business,” so they need to be educated, she said. People also need to understand that AI “is a completely different data workload” from what the streaming and file-sharing businesses are used to, she said. “With the workloads of AI, we’re on dirt roads.”
Clay Wooley, director of technology strategy at consulting firm Ready.net, said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the world saw the need for people to “work remotely, to live where they want to live and work where they want to live.” IXPs and data centers haven’t gotten enough attention, he said. If you have a 10 GB fiber connection, but everyone is using the same IXP, “you’re going to start seeing delays.”
IXPs will become smaller and more localized, Wooley predicted. He compared that dynamic to the proliferation of small cells in 5G. “You’re getting more service to the edge to help move that traffic more quickly,” he said. “IXPs need a similar solution.”
Wooley noted his experience as an engineer for C Spire, a regional wireless carrier in Mississippi. It had to build much of its own infrastructure, but all its network traffic had to travel through an IXP out of state, he said.
Garland McCoy, executive director of the Precision Ag Connectivity & Accuracy Stakeholder Alliance, agreed that there's a “real shortage” of IXPs serving rural America. The distance from IXPs means “latency is a real problem in thinly populated areas.” Broadband availability remains a bigger problem for small farms than for the huge “agribusinesses” that dominate farming in many areas, he said.
McCoy noted that precision agriculture is good for farmers and consumers, explaining that it helps reduce the need for fertilizer and pesticides and uses water more efficiently.
But consultant Brian Smith said every area doesn’t need its own IXP. “Sustainability is the challenge,” he said, noting that a small IXP costs about $100,000 annually to operate. “In smaller markets, that’s hard to sustain.” More IXPs also means the need for other infrastructure, he said.
“The other problem is you have [local exchange carriers] and cable companies that probably won't interconnect with those ISPs because they don’t today,” Smith added. Providers “want to independently offer their [own] routes.” He highlighted an IXP that developers built from scratch in Denver. “It’s a private entity … based on subscription,” which has to meet technical thresholds to get companies like Netflix, AWS and Google to participate, he said.