ANIX is managed by RASH. RASH is the Academic Network of Albania. Founded in 2009, it provides Internet connection to public universities in Albania, connecting those universities to the European Academic Network (GEANT) and to the Internet. RASH also provides other services to universities (such as portals for professors and students and software for HR, administration and accounting).
The purpose of RASH was to found an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) called Albanian Neutral Internet Exchange (ANIX) and from march 2017 it’s operational.
An Internet exchange point (IX or IXP) is a physical infrastructure through which Internet service providers (ISPs) and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) exchange Internet traffic between their networks (autonomous systems).
IXPs reduce the portion of an ISP’s traffic which must be delivered via their upstream transit providers, thereby reducing the average per-bit delivery cost of their service. Furthermore, the increased number of paths available through the IXP improves routing efficiency and fault-tolerance. Main features of IXP are:
- An Internet exchange point (IXP) enables local networks to efficiently exchange information at a common point within a country rather than needing to exchange local Internet traffic overseas.
- Therefore an IXP is a component of Internet infrastructure that can increase the affordability and quality of the Internet for local communities.
- The advantages of the direct interconnection are numerous, but the primary reasons are cost, latency, and bandwidth.
- The direct interconnection, often located in the same city as both networks, avoids the need for data to travel to other cities (potentially on other continents) to get from one network to another, thus reducing latency.
- A connection to a local IXP may allow them to transfer data without limit,, vastly improving the bandwidth between customers of the two adjacent ISPs.