Funny that i live in Egypt, i work in the field and i've spent the last three days at ICT (information and comm. tech.) conference and did not hear of that, but i'd love to see it working, our past experiences with peering were very small and not effective, it started with CRIX and ended with CAIX, which not all ISPs were excited about , There are around 10 ISPs in egypt with their own AS number and probably 7 of them with transit links from Flagtelecom or UUNet, the other 3 got their links from local ISPs, As alot of other developing countries, peering is established on personal relationships, and even with that it doesnt work well, because both parties couldnt agree on routing policies or even personal disliking(pathetic) As i said most of the 10 ISPs didnt join CAIX although they are all at the same CO(physical proximity), Ramsis CO is the main CO here, I was involved in both IX, so i can give a brief history, i'm following this thread and i'd love to share opinions, suggestions, in public or private, i know there are alot of experienced people are reading this and i'd like to get a chance to discuss this with them, CRIX started by an ISP+Datacenter here (NTC=Egynet+ECC) at late 2002, They have a large Datacenter and they thought if they could bring other ISPs in, it'd save them international bandwidth, but project died so quickly, it was deployed by Flagtelecom, i guess no one saw benefit and no reason to pay, so they all just didnt join and that was it, As for CRIX (Cairo Regional Exchange Point), its a Govern. initiative and its free, but still most ISPs didnt feel its needed because they either thought that the local traffic is very small or that all other ISPs will abuse their upload speed because they have a large datacenter/servers.., We run 4xOC3 worth of Internet, we peer over CAIX with 2 other ISPs and the traffic between the three of us is 12 Mb :) so its not much, but its free and it costs us nothing but an ethernet port and ethernet cable. My guess is that all the internet traffic overhere is P2P apps, being downloaded from Asia or US. Egypt has over 80 Million in population, 10 million owns a cell phone, half of them with computers and half of them with internet access, so it all boils to not more than 5-7 Gbs of total internet traffic, on the other hand L3 VPNs has grown so much in the last two years, so there is something in the way i believe. On 2/9/06, Joe Abley <jabley@isc.org> wrote:

At the risk of perpetuating a thread that arguably should have died some days ago, someone without a nanog-post subscription reminded me of GPX, who have plans to being an exchange point live in Egypt (amongst other places).

http://www.gpx.ie/

No association, knowledge or endorsement implied, but maybe this information is useful to someone.

Joe