eXchange West is an Internet exchange on the irish westcoast, based in Galway City. The purpose is to optimize routing between irish (and other interested) ISPs and content providers. Currently most irish networks haul all traffic to Dublin and exchange it there. Some even take their traffic as far as London before it comes back to the emerald isle.
The rules for eXchange West are simple:
eXchange West is located in Airwire's Datacenter in Galway. The hardware we're running the exchange on currently is a Cisco Catalyst 4006 on Supervisor III with the most recent IOS (12.2(25)EWA14 from 20-May-08) for that unit.
The datacenter has fiber from Airwire, BT and Smart Telecom in place. Airwire and Smart Telecom are using the Galway MAN, so potentially others using the MAN could also easily get their fiber set up to terminate in the DC. There is also the possibility for roof-space, so that a connection could be brought in using wireless technologies. Every peer has to arrange for their own connectivity, rackspace and the crossconnect to the switch.
This website is still under development, but will hopefully be a bit more thorough in the future.
Airwire's datacenter is the only datacenter in Galway, that is network neutral, there are two independant fiber drops into the building on diverse path, roof space is available and obviously, the guy behind ExWest is Airwire's CTO. However, ExWest is not run by Airwire, it's an independant project and could theoretically be moved anywhere if necessary. Or expanded anywhere, for that sake, if the demand arises and the funding is sourced.
Current list of networks:
Feel free to drop me an email at martin (at) exwest (dot) net, and we'll see what needs to be done to get you hooked up.
(2009-06-10) - RIPE has allocated 195.60.82.64/26 today. That will probably not be globally routable, but then again, who needs IPv4 :)
(2009-06-04) - RIPE has allocated AS49416 and the IPv6 prefix 2001:7f8:4d::/48 today. We're still waiting for the IPv4 allocation. BGP has been set up, and the prefix is already seen on part of the Internet. See the Ghost Route Hunter Project.
(2009-06-02) - exwest.ie has been registered and processes by the IEDR, as the business name registration now is in place.
(2009-05-21) - The CRO has registered the business names "exwest" and "exchange west" for us.
(2009-05-19) - IP and AS ressources have been requested from RIPE. These need to be in place before we can get the initial peering sessions set up. Also the CRO has confirmed the business name registrations for "exwest" and "exchange west", so as soon as the listing is available on the CRO website, we'll be ordering the .ie domains.
(2009-04-23) - A switch for ExWest has been sourced, that'll actually allow for some expansion. We've sourced a Cisco Catalyst 4006 with Supervisor III. Might want to see, if I can get a more recent supervisor module though.
(2008-06-28) - The domain exwest.net was bought. It might take some time to get the actual project off the ground as a lot of things have to be sorted yet