AI Agent Hunter: What was the research process like when you first got started verses today?
Hunter: In the beginning, it was manual. Very manual. A lot of researching, reading, studying maps, digging for information on building owners, etc. I made initial contacts with many of the neutral colocation facility owners in other cities by attending industry conferences, but most of those weren’t direct meetings. They were indirect introductions from the carriers that I had as customers in New York. I would ask them what buildings they were located in like mine, but in other cities. The carrier’s own fiber network maps were helpful, but they were usually just dots on a map and didn’t list actual addresses. It was a lot of word-of-mouth. Eventually, over time, I accumulated the knowledge of the street addresses, the owners of the buildings and, or neutral colocation facilities within those buildings and then began my published research series.
Since about 2021 it has been a bit different for me. Back in 2010 a non-profit called PeeringDB got started. It is a user-contributed content site that tracks all of the Internet Exchanges, ASN’s that connect to them, and Facilities that they reside within in the world.
During COVID I decided to map where the largest IX’s were in the U.S. to my original Meet-Me Series featured facilities. I was curious to see where the largest IX’s were at that time because the U.S. homegrown IX’s were not known to be as large, relative to the European IX’s member counts, due to the size of the U.S verses that of Western Europe, as well as the country and language diversity of Europe in such a small geographical area as compared to the U.S.
I became a sponsor of PeeringDB, via my Family Office fund, Newby Ventures, and I requested an API in to the PeeringDB database, so that I could extract all of the data and analyze it. After analyzing the data, my initial assumption proved to be accurate. The largest IX’s in the U.S. were in the exact same MMR’s that I featured almost 20 years before - and many of those were my former telx and Netrality facilities.
How did I know? Simple. Critical mass begets critical mass. Networks go to where networks are. It’s physics and economies of scale.
The data that reinforced the thesis inspired me to re-write the Meet Me In series, but this time not solely as MMR research. This time it would be the new service of the IX. Just as I had revisited the original Meet Me In series with the focus on Ethernet and VoIP 15 years before, I now revisited that series and those locations by mapping the IX’s in those cities and sites and in the same order.
I started in 2021 with New York City, as I originally did in 2003, and provided an extra amount of background on the impetus once again. This laid the groundwork for what was to come. As I re-wrote each article in the series based upon the data I began to see a pattern, or at least something that could become easily repeatable.
Now that I had access to the global data I could apply a standard analysis to each site without having to call each and every person that owned the real estate and, or neutral colocation facility within the address. This could save me a lot of time and allow me to be able to create a global research analysis and automate it. So, I did.
Enter the New Meet Me In - IX Research Series...
NEXT: Chapter 10 - Global IX Research, the Switches and the Sites (Updated Daily) →
