Interconnection and Peering: Why Physical Location Still Matters

Interconnection — the ability to physically cross-connect with carriers, clouds, and other networks inside the same building — is why identical power pricing at two facilities can mean very different value. A cross-connect costs $100-450 a month, but it buys access to whatever ecosystem already terminates fiber in that meet-me room; at Equinix’s Frankfurt FR5 campus, that ecosystem is 546 networks and 36 internet exchanges, per PeeringDB. At a low-density regional facility, the same monthly fee buys access to a handful of networks. Location still matters because interconnection density is not portable — it is built up building by building, over years, and does not move when you sign a lease elsewhere.

Key takeaways

• Cross-connects run $100-450/month plus $500-1,500 setup; the operator’s real cost is closer to $10-40/month equivalent — the widest-margin line item in colocation. Full breakdown: cross-connect pricing guide.
• Interconnection density is measurable, not marketing. PeeringDB publishes per-building network and IX counts. Equinix FR5 (Frankfurt) leads our tracked facilities at 546 networks; Equinix SG1 (Singapore) carries 527.
• Peering avoids transit fees. Transit runs $0.05-0.09/Mbps for competitive 100-400 GigE ports (TeleGeography, Q2 2025); settlement-free peering at an IX or via direct cross-connect eliminates that per-Mbps cost entirely for matched traffic.
• IX traffic keeps setting records. DE-CIX Frankfurt hit 19.6 Tbps peak in July 2026, up 89% over five years; the global DE-CIX network peaked at 29.5 Tbps during 2026 World Cup traffic.
• Carrier hotels concentrate value geographically. 60 Hudson Street (NYC) and One Wilshire (LA) each host 200-300+ carriers in a single building — density that cannot be replicated by building a new facility next door.
• Virtual interconnection (VXC/Fabric) extends reach without a physical presence, priced by bandwidth and duration rather than a fixed port, useful for reaching a dense hub from a facility where you have no cage.

Live network and IX counts by facility are on individual pages in our data center catalog; benchmark rack and power pricing alongside connectivity in the colocation price index.

How interconnection actually works

Three distinct commercial arrangements move traffic between networks inside a building, and pricing logic differs for each:

Mechanism	What it is	Typical price	Best for
Physical cross-connect	Dedicated fiber/copper run between two cages in the same building	$100-450/month + $500-1,500 setup	Direct, low-latency links to a specific known partner (cloud on-ramp, carrier, CDN)
Public peering (IX port)	One port on a shared switching fabric, exchanging traffic with every other member via BGP	Port-based, roughly comparable to a 100-400 GigE transit port net of the exchange’s own fee; often bundled at $500-2,000+/month depending on capacity	Reaching many networks (dozens to hundreds) through a single physical connection
IP transit	Paid upstream carries traffic to the entire internet, no peering relationship required	$0.05-0.09/Mbps for 100-400 GigE in competitive hubs (TeleGeography Q2 2025); higher in secondary markets	Default reachability where peering isn’t available or traffic volumes don’t justify direct peering
Virtual cross-connect (VXC)	Software-defined circuit over a network-as-a-service fabric (e.g., Megaport, Equinix Fabric)	Priced by bandwidth/duration, comparable to a physical cross-connect for the equivalent capacity	Reaching a facility where you hold no physical presence

A single deployment typically uses all four: transit for general reachability, an IX port for high-volume regional peers, direct cross-connects to specific clouds and CDNs, and virtual circuits to extend reach into hubs you don’t physically occupy.

The meet-me room: where the value actually sits

A meet-me room (MMR) is the physically secured space where carriers terminate fiber and tenants cross-connect. It is the infrastructure that makes an entire building’s interconnection story possible — a facility with a thin MMR and few resident carriers cannot sell dense interconnection no matter how it prices cross-connects. The distinguishing feature of a carrier hotel versus an ordinary colocation facility is the number and diversity of networks with fiber already terminating in that room, not the building’s power or cooling specification.

Carrier-neutral operation is now standard practice: Equinix, Digital Realty, and most independent operators let any carrier or cloud install a presence and let any tenant cross-connect with any other, rather than favoring an owner’s own network. Confirm neutrality explicitly for any facility with a legacy telecom-carrier owner.

Measuring density: real numbers, not sales claims

Interconnection density is the one colocation attribute that is independently verifiable. PeeringDB — the industry’s public, community-maintained registry — publishes per-facility counts of resident networks and internet exchanges, submitted by the networks themselves. Coloprice syncs this data into every facility page in our catalog as a “Source: PeeringDB” block, so density claims can be checked building by building rather than taken from an operator’s marketing page.

The most interconnected facilities we track, by resident network count:

Facility	City	Networks (PeeringDB)	Internet exchanges present
Equinix FR5	Frankfurt	546	36
Equinix SG1	Singapore	527	11
Equinix DC1	Ashburn	517	8
Equinix CH1	Chicago	332	10
Equinix LD8	London (Docklands)	314	10
Equinix SV1	San Jose	282	8
Equinix MB1	Mumbai	256	7
Equinix HK2	Hong Kong	200	8

Data: PeeringDB, synced 2026-08-27; see individual facility pages for current counts, e.g. Equinix SG1 and Equinix HK2. Counts reflect networks with a listed presence at the specific building, not an operator’s global network.

The gap between the top and bottom of that list is the practical answer to “does location matter”: a tenant in Equinix FR5 reaches an order of magnitude more networks over a single cross-connect or IX port than a tenant in a facility with a few dozen resident networks — without paying transit rates for that reach.

Major internet exchanges: scale and where they sit

Internet exchanges are the shared switching fabrics that let one port reach every other connected member. Scale varies enormously by region and age of the exchange:

Exchange	Region	Scale signal
DE-CIX Frankfurt	Germany	19.6 Tbps peak traffic, July 2026 (record); DE-CIX global network peaked at 29.5 Tbps during 2026 World Cup traffic
AMS-IX	Amsterdam	One of Europe’s original and largest exchanges; long-standing top-3 global peak traffic
LINX	London	Primary UK exchange, hundreds of member networks across multiple London facilities
Equinix Internet Exchange	Global (40+ metros)	Distributed model — one membership peers across many Equinix-operated exchanges worldwide
SGIX	Singapore	Not-for-profit exchange with points of presence across Equinix SG1/SG2/SG3/SG5, Digital Realty, and other Singapore facilities
HKIX	Hong Kong	Primary Hong Kong exchange, points of presence including Equinix HK2

Exchange scale correlates with regional traffic gravity, not just population: Frankfurt and Amsterdam outrank larger cities because decades of carrier and content-network colocation decisions concentrated there first, and switching costs keep that gravity self-reinforcing.

Carrier hotels: where density concentrates in one building

A small number of buildings worldwide carry outsized interconnection weight because they were the first meet-me points in their metro and never lost that position:

• 60 Hudson Street, New York — 200+ carriers, ISPs, and network providers in a single Manhattan building; the historical center of North American transatlantic cable termination.
• One Wilshire, Los Angeles — 300+ network service providers; the primary US gateway to trans-Pacific submarine cables.
• Equinix Ashburn campus, Virginia — the largest peering point on the US East Coast, anchoring “Data Center Alley.”
• Infomart, Dallas — 1.58 million sq ft carrier hotel serving as the South-Central US interconnection hub.
• Telehouse, London — major UK carrier hotel alongside the LINX exchange facilities.

New construction cannot replicate this quickly: density accrues from years of carriers choosing to terminate fiber in the same building because everyone else already has. A newly built facility with superior power and cooling specs still starts from zero resident networks.

Why physical location still matters in an AI and cloud-native era

Public cloud and virtual interconnection reduce but do not eliminate the location premium:

1. Latency is physics, not engineering. Fiber-optic signal propagation adds roughly 1 ms of round-trip latency per 100 km — no software layer removes that. Distributed AI inference, high-frequency trading, and real-time ad-bidding still require sub-millisecond paths that only proximity delivers.
2. On-ramps still terminate in specific buildings. AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and Google Cloud Interconnect are available only at named colocation facilities. Choosing a facility with the on-ramps you need avoids extending a private circuit across a metro.
3. AI training and inference clusters increasingly peer directly with data providers and inference customers, following the same interconnection logic that built out CDN and ad-tech peering a decade earlier — see our comparison of inference vs. training infrastructure for how these workloads differ in connectivity needs.
4. Virtual cross-connects extend reach, not density. A VXC into Equinix FR5 gets you bandwidth to that ecosystem, but you still depend on a physical facility somewhere maintaining that density — the underlying scarcity has not gone away, it has just been made reachable remotely at a markup.

What to do before signing

• Pull the facility’s PeeringDB record (or check its page in our catalog) before evaluating quoted cross-connect and IX pricing — density determines whether that spend buys reach or isolation.
• Match your workload to the mechanism. High-volume, few-partner traffic favors direct cross-connects; broad reachability with lower per-partner volume favors an IX port; occasional or overflow traffic stays on transit.
• Confirm carrier neutrality in writing, especially at facilities with a legacy telecom owner.
• Ask which cloud on-ramps physically terminate in the building, not just which the operator’s marketing lists as “available via partner facility.”
• Model total connectivity spend, not the headline colocation rate — cross-connects, IX ports, and transit commonly add 15-30% on top of quoted power and space pricing; use our total cost example as a starting template.
• Request a quote naming your target metro and interconnection requirements through our quote service to benchmark facility-specific offers against index pricing.

Interconnection density does not show up in a power price sheet, but it is frequently the larger driver of total value in a colocation decision — verify it the same way you verify power price and vacancy, with public data rather than a sales deck.