MSK-IX (Moscow Internet eXchange) is an Internet eXchange Point (IXP) with headquarters in

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

. With over 549 connected networks and 7,7 Tbps of peak traffic (February 2025), MSK-IX is one of the world's largest IXPs. According to the Internet Exchange Report by Hurricane Electric Internet Services, MSK-IX is the largest IXP in Russia and 17th largest in the world by the numbers of members. MSK-IX operates Internet eXchanges (IXes) in 9 cities:

, St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Stavropol,

Samara Samara, formerly known as Kuybyshev (1935–1991), is the largest city and administrative centre of Samara Oblast in Russia. The city is located at the confluence of the Volga and the Samara (Volga), Samara rivers, with a population of over 1.14 ...

Kazan Kazan; , IPA: Help:IPA/Tatar, ɑzanis the largest city and capital city, capital of Tatarstan, Russia. The city lies at the confluence of the Volga and the Kazanka (river), Kazanka Rivers, covering an area of , with a population of over 1. ...

, Ekaterinburg,

Novosibirsk Novosibirsk is the largest city and administrative centre of Novosibirsk Oblast and the Siberian Federal District in Russia. As of the 2021 Russian census, 2021 census, it had a population of 1,633,595, making it the most populous city in Siber ...

, Vladivostok and maintains an access PoP in

Riga Riga ( ) is the capital, Primate city, primate, and List of cities and towns in Latvia, largest city of Latvia. Home to 591,882 inhabitants (as of 2025), the city accounts for a third of Latvia's total population. The population of Riga Planni ...

(

Latvia Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is one of the three Baltic states, along with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south. It borders Russia to the east and Belarus to t ...

). MSK-IX operates a distributed DNS platform, which provides authoritative name servers for the country-code top-level domains ( ccTLDs) .RU and .РФ for Russia. Also it operates alternative DNS root servers of Russian National Domain Name System for Roskomnadzor due to ( Sovereign Internet Law).

History

MSK-IX was founded in 1995 pursuant to the treaty signed by 6 Russian ISPs willing to reduce IP-traffic latency and international backhaul costs. The treaty assigned the Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN) as the administrator of the forthcoming IP-traffic exchange and defined technical requirements for connecting ISPs. The first MSK-IX PoP was established by RIPN at M9 facility on Butlerova st., 7. In 2001, MSK-IX became an autonomous organization. In 2002, MSK-IX joined Euro-IX, an international association of IXPs. State-run telecommunications company Rostelecom have acquired the majority of MSK-IX stock in 2015.

Technical platform

MSK-IX operates a distributed

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

-based switching platform spanning 38 PoPs in 10 cities. After the introduction of the "Dual Core" topology in Moscow in 2015, the total capacity of MSK-IX reached 8 Tbps. MSK-IX maintains a dedicated public peering VLAN at each of 9 metro areas and supports arbitrary private VLANs. Inter-city connections are provided on-net by MSK-IX and via partner ISPs. Common interface speeds are 1, 10 and 100G. The route-servers provided at each of MSK-IX public peering VLANs allow for

routing Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a Network theory, network or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched ...

policy control and DDoS blackholing by use of BGP communities. The MSK-IX DNS Cloud is a distributed anycast DNS platform located in 7

federal districts of Russia The federal districts ( rus, федеральные округа, p=fʲɪdʲɪˈralʲnɨjɪ ɐkrʊˈɡa) are groupings of the federal subjects of Russia, federal subjects of Russia. Federal districts consist of a group of regions with various ...

, in Europe and in the Americas. It provides authoritative name servers for the country-code top-level domains ( ccTLDs) .RU, .РФ, .ДЕТИ, .TATAR and .SU. for Russia and alternative DNS root servers of Russian National Domain Name System for Roskomnadzor due to ( Sovereign Internet Law). In Moscow, MSK-IX operates M9.PLUS colocation space of 200 racks located at M9 (Butlerova st., 7).

Professional community support

MSK-IX is a regular host and organizer of events for telecoms community. On the occasion of its 10th anniversary in 2005, MSK-IX held its first Technical seminar. Reincarnated a year later as "MSK-IX Peering Forum", the event became a regular gathering of 500+ telecom professionals in Moscow with an agenda focused on network operations, security and peering. In 2011, MSK-IX supported RIPE NCC in launching the ENOG (Eurasia Network Operators Group) conferences. As of October 2017, MSK-IX sponsored 6 and was serving as local host for 5 ENOG events.

References

{{reflist

External links

MSK-IX official website

MSK-IX looking glass and prefix lists

MSK-IX traffic statistics

MSK-IX connected networks
Organizations established in 1995 Internet exchange points Internet exchange points in Europe Internet exchange points in Russia Internet in Russia Organizations based in Moscow Economy of Russia

History

Technical platform

Professional community support

See also

References

External links