IXP Workshop on Peering and Interconnection in the Arab World : "Towards unlocking regional interconnection opportunities" will be held in Manama-Bahrain, kindly hosted by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) of Bahrain and with the support of ISOC .
This workshop will be held on the eve of the Annual Meeting of the Arab ICT Regulators Network (AREGNET), on 3 and 4 October 2018 in the same place. This workshop aims to review the challenges and opportunities posed by this project.
The benefits of routing local Internet traffic via a common exchange point, are numerous and provide both operators and end users with many advantages:
• International links are often more expensive, slower and more congested. ISPs can make substantial cost savings, by reducing their dependency on those links;
• Local users are offered more bandwidth at more affordable prices, as the overall costs of capacity is lowered, thus improving affordability of Internet services;
• Internet service quality is enhanced, as local traffic is routed to its destination via a much smaller number of hops, causing a substantial reduction in latency and an enhanced user experience;
• The broader the customer base that can be reached through the IXP, the greater the opportunities are for local content providers and services that require high speed connections at lower costs;
• ISPs get to choose between different carrier options that are made available through the IXP to route their upstream traffic, resulting in a more competitive wholesale transit market, where switching between transit providers is as simple as a router configuration change;
• Once established, the IXP becomes a natural location to host other key services that further improve speed and reliability of Internet access to end users, such as DNS servers for the country's ccTLD and other key gTLDs, root server mirrors, and time servers, in addition to traffic measurement facilities such as looking glasses and routing measurement tools;
• In terms of improving reliability of domestic Internet services, the presence of a local IXP enables the formation of agreements to be used in events of international cable cuts and disruption of upstream Internet links, where a member uses the IXP as a temporary route to the Internet via another member's network.
