What is the PNIX?

The Palmerston North Internet Exchange (PNIX) was established to allow entities in the Palmerston North ergion to send traffic directly to and from each other rather than via their ISP. This activity is known as peering.

This provides improvements in speed as traffic travels directly between the parties and reduces load on the network by reducing the need for traffic to be duplicated through one or more intermediate ISP routers. In some cases this also avoids traffic being routed "out of town", or incurring ISP's traffic charges.

Each connected entity could add specific details of networks they want to talk to directly to their routers (static routes and bilateral BGP sessions) but this quickly becomes an administrative headache as adds, changes and deletions become time consuming and error prone if more than a few peering sessions are configured.

The Palmerston North Internet Exchange provides two route servers which contain routing details for each of the participants. This simplifies peering enormously for most exchange users.