EdgeConneX has announced a partnership with Northwest Access Exchange (NWAX) to build a new remote NWAX node into its Portland, Oregon Edge Data Center (EDC), available in the fourth quarter.
Located at 23245 NW Evergreen Parkway, Hillsboro, Oregon, the build will facilitate connectivity advancement of the local Internet community with superior content delivery to local-market consumers. The partnership also allows EdgeConneX customers to connect and exchange traffic locally with NWAX’s base of participants.
EdgeConneX will provide a dark-fiber path between the NWAX node inside its Portland EDC and the NWAX Core Switch, located at 921 SW Washington Street, Portland, Oregon, which will allow bandwidth to scale as members are added and traffic flow increases. This remote switch provides another location for NWAX members to connect to the exchange. NWAX currently has 72 members and is the 14th largest IX in the nation. Current customers taking advantage of direct access to NWAX’s bilateral and multilateral peering services include wireless carriers, service providers, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), enterprises, healthcare providers and government entities.
“Including a remote NWAX node inside our Portland EDC will enable EdgeConneX to provide customers with a new access point to the NWAX peering fabric,” said Clint Heiden, chief commercial officer at EdgeConneX. “NWAX’s established participant base, coupled with our purpose-built and strategically located Portland EDC, will allow providers to mitigate traffic latency and packet loss, avoid transit costs and improve regional fault tolerance, while experiencing the fastest and most reliable physical delivery of content to local-market consumers.”
Founded in 2001 by Oregon Health & Science University and broken out into a nonprofit 501c(6) member controlled entity in 2014, NWAX is the Internet exchange in Portland. The goal of NWAX is to improve the quality of the Internet in the region by keeping local traffic local. Participating networks peer with each other across their network fabric and take part in the regional economy. NWAX grew out of the need to directly connect three Oregon higher education entities and then expanded to include other regional organizations and businesses that wanted to gain the efficiencies of local traffic exchange. NWAX members now include Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Application Service Providers (ASPs), carriers, cable companies, VoIP providers, government entities, academic institutions and content providers.
“NWAX is excited to add EdgeConneX as our sixth fabric access site in the Portland metro area. EdgeConneX is donating a high-quality switching platform and dark fiber backhaul, which will optimize this extension site for high-bandwidth member connections. NWAX looks forward to welcoming more content distribution members to our membership base as we continue to grow rapidly,” adds Eric Rosenberry, president of NWAX. “As a member-controlled nonprofit, NWAX focuses on helping the region grow the network economy in a facility-, provider- and vendor-agnostic way.”