IXPs as the Foundation of Connectivity and Digital Development

Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) constitute critical infrastructure for reducing dependence on external transit and improving network performance; however, their deployment in rural areas of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) remains limited, and the adoption of routing security mechanisms is incomplete. This study evaluates three dimensions: the regional evolution of IXPs, observable routing-security evidence among entities associated with IXPs, and the operational performance of a pilot deployment in Junín, Peru. The methodology combined a bibliographic analysis of sources indexed in the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, and Scopus with data from PeeringDB, Regional Internet Registry (RIR) delegation files, BGP tables, Looking Glass servers, RPKI validation, and MANRS records. For the Junín pilot, a before/after comparison was conducted during March 2024. Between 2016 and 2021, the number of active IXPs in LAC increased from 68 to 98 sites (+44%), while 60 IXPs met the inclusion criteria for the routing-security analysis in the available January–March 2023 extraction records; of these, 30 (50%) showed public evidence of at least one routing-security mechanism among their associated entities. In Junín, the observed mean RTT changed from 137 to 6.9 ms for the Meta measurements and from 138 to 43.8 ms for the Google measurements; because different endpoints were measured before and after deployment, these values represent observed route-specific changes rather than strictly comparable reductions and they do not constitute an isolated causal estimate of the peering effect because the design did not include a control site and, in Meta’s case, the regional cache was part of the same intervention. Netflix was assessed using traceroute because an equivalent ICMP measurement could not be obtained and, therefore, its results were not combined with the ping-based ones. The urban–rural comparison of transit costs relies on approximate values for Lima and Junín compiled from secondary information and pilot documentation, whose original official source could not be traced; it is presented only as an illustrative order of magnitude, not as a verified official or regional billing measurement. Taken together, the results provide site-specific empirical evidence from a rural pilot and a regional framework for studying traffic localization, routing security, and connectivity gaps while avoiding generalizing the site’s results to rural LAC as a whole.