How Latin American IXPs should evolve to keep up with digital ecosystem growth

Latin America's internet exchange point (IXP) infrastructure is struggling to cope due to the rapidly evolving digital ecosystem. 

"IXP infrastructure in Latin America has been key to improving internet access and latency in the region, but its traditional concept, centered on traffic exchange between ISPs, has begun to fall short of the new demands of the digital ecosystem," Iván Žilić, director and CTO of PIT Chile, told BNamericas.

PIT Chile is a private entity that operates the country's IXPs.

Žilić said IXPs should evolve into 'anything exchange points', or NXPs, and enable the integration of different players. 

"IP traffic is growing, but even more so is the demand for interconnection between complex players: public clouds, [content delivery networks], financial systems, healthcare platforms, digital government applications and distributed services," he said. 

The transition from IXP to NXP means shifting from "moving data packets" to facilitating digital relationships.

"The region is in a transitional stage. Some countries remain anchored in the old model, while others are beginning to adopt a more strategic and functional vision of interconnection," he said. "This change is not only semantic, but structural. It involves thinking of the exchange point as a critical node of the digital ecosystem, enabling secure, efficient and local interactions between all types of services."

Žilić claimed that PIT Chile has established itself as a "true NXP." The entity connects the main ISPs, as well as cloud providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, Huawei and Oracle, in addition to banks, insurers, healthcare companies, state-owned operators and integrators. 

The IXP has 368 ports, 109 autonomous system numbers (ASN) and capacity of 30.6Tbps. 

Brazil is the most mature market in terms of volume, territorial coverage and player participation. The country's internet exchange network, Ix.Br, has 38 IXPs with capacity of 40Tbps. 

In 2024, Argentina had 28 IXPs with more than 600 members connected, 3,000 ASN and 5.6Tbps capacity.

Meanwhile, Mexico made "significant progress" with the arrival of more cloud infrastructure, according to Žilić.

Outlook

"One of the biggest challenges is overcoming fragmentation. There is still mistrust among stakeholders, conflicting visions between the technical and political, and even between the public and private sectors," Žilić said. "It is also key to advance models of economic sustainability and autonomous governance, which combine operational neutrality with strategic vision and high technical standards."  

Žilić mentioned the need to create a body that orders the national digital ecosystem. 

"This body should not compete with or regulate NXPs, but rather facilitate their enhanced role, integrating decisions on infrastructure, cybersecurity, cloud governance, data, artificial intelligence and regulatory compliance," he said. 

The great benefit of an organization like this, according to Žilić, is harmonization. "When all the players in the digital ecosystem move in different directions, resources are wasted, efforts are duplicated and bottlenecks arise."