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On the Geography of X-Connects

Companies like Equinix, CoreSite, and Telx manage and operate carrier-neutral colocation facilities (also called colos) where they provide, among other offerings, interconnection services. These facilities supply the infrastructure (e.g., rack space, cabling, power, and physical security) necessary for network operators to colocate their routers for easy interconnection. This work focuses on identifying interconnections of the “cross connect” type, i.e., dedicated point-topoint private peering links (which might be used to carry transit traffic or peer-to-peer traffic) that the network operators can buy from the colo providers so that their networks can exchange traffic within the confines of these facilities. In particular, our goal is to infer who is interconnecting with whom in which colos in which cities. Precisely locating the private peering links between two networks is a prerequisite for studying, for example, the root causes of the peering disputes between large content and eyeball providers in recent years. This paper introduces a multi-pronged approach for discovering these links. We illustrate the approach with case studies of colos in Seattle and Chicago. These studies demonstrate the promise as well as the challenges inherent in such a mapping effort.