Toronto Internet Exchange

The Toronto Internet Exchange Community (TorIX) is a not-for-profit Internet Exchange Point (IXP) located in a carrier hotel at 151 Front Street West, Equinix's TR2 data centre at 45 Parliament Street and 905 King Street West in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. As of March 2021^[update], TorIX has 259 unique autonomous systems representing 285 peer connections and peak traffic rates of 1.344 Tbps, making it the largest IXP in Canada. According to Wikipedia's List of Internet Exchange Points by Size, TorIX is the 16th largest IXP in the world in numbers of peers, and 17th in the world in traffic averages. The Exchange is organized and run by industry professionals in voluntary capacity.

Within 151 Front Street, TorIX is accessible within facilities operated by Equinix, Cologix, Neutral Data Centres and Frontier Networks, or available via the building's meet-me-room (MMR), which makes the IX reachable by any organization with a presence in the building. At Equinix TR2, TorIX is available to all organizations present there. At 905 King Street West, TorIX is accessible via the building meet-me-room.

TorIX initially started by Bill Campbell and Jason Lixfeld in 1997 the RACO facility in suite 604 at 151 Front Street West. In 2003, the exchange began offering gigabit Ethernet. The Exchange began offering 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in 2008 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports in 2015.

The exchange is Ethernet-based and currently operates Cisco Nexus 9000 series switches. Core nodes handle port speeds of Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, including bonded configurations. Peers connect to the Layer 2 fabric using IPv4 & IPv6 addresses provided by TorIX to communicate with each other using the BGP routing protocol. Single-mode fiber is the only physical connection media supported.

The Exchange also offers two BGP Route-Servers, which allow peers to exchange prefixes with each other while minimizing the number of direct BGP peering sessions configured on their routers. Participation is voluntary, with approximately 85 percent of the membership using the free service. Strict prefix filtering to prevent unintentional announcements of IP address blocks to other participants. The exchange allows participants the option of eliminating the TorIX ASN from the AS path of prefixes received via the route-servers. This can substantially increase the utility of the route-servers for participants, but should only be undertaken after careful consideration. In addition, TorIX participants will have a range of BGP communities that can be used for traffic engineering purposes.

The Exchange operates a members-only portal that allows peers to publish their peering policies, contact other members with peering requests, configure route-server access and options, track traffic usage, etc.

TorIX will consider hosting Internet community projects that are of an interest to members of the Exchange or the wider Canadian Internet.

Since 2012, TorIX has been hosting a cluster of Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers for use by the Internet as a whole. Using servers which sync to both GPS and CDMA sources, the TorIX NTP cluster is a stratum 1 time source. The original equipment was donated by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) and has since been replaced and upgraded. As of June 2019, it provides time to over 500,000 devices worldwide every minute.