About us
What is SFMIX?
The San Francisco Metropolitan Internet Exchange (SFMIX) project is based within the San Francisco “Silicon Valley” region of California. Internet Exchanges (IXs) serve as a focal point of bandwidth or network capacity. Participating entities interconnect or “peer” with one another to improve network performance, increase resiliency, and reduce operational costs.
The Internet Society IXP Toolkit & Wikipedia both provide background information on Internet Exchanges.
Why Connect?
Local, sustainable, organic… bits. By keeping your traffic local you are actively using less energy whilst also reducing latency and improving your connectivity to the assets and services of our participants. Essentially, the more organizations that connect, the better the environment. This is a local and cooperative example of Metcalfe’s Law.
Where to Connect?
SFMIX currently offers core IX fabric locations within the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Additional locations are planned based on demand and resource availability. Per the charter of organization, core fabric locations are only placed within carrier-neutral data centers. We define such locations as having a diversity of carriers and ISPs available to all tenants of the building, in addition to traditional local or regional incumbent providers.
200 Paul Ave, San Francisco
365 Main St, San Francisco
48233 Warm Springs Blvd, Fremont
11 Great Oaks Blvd, San Jose
2807 Mission College Blvd, Santa Clara
2972 Stender Way, Santa Clara
3223 Kenneth St, Santa Clara
History of SFMIX
SFMIX was founded in mid 2006 with a single point of presence (POP) at 365 Main Street in downtown San Francisco. The original scope of the project was to create a building specific IX for all tenants. The legacy building management sponsored rack space & power – while the community provided the rest of the infrastructure (switches, ARIN payments, patch cabling, monitoring server). The IX ran for several years with minimal growth but a strong in-building following.
Beginning in 2013, SFMIX began expanding to additional data center facilities in the cities of San Francisco, Santa Clara, Fremont, and San Jose in the Bay Area region. SFMIX’s growth is fueled by community contributions of equipment, volunteer time, and a shared passion for a better Internet.
As of March 2020, SFMIX has active infrastructure across 6 locations. All of these locations feature 1, 10, or 100Gbps port speed availability. SFMIX is registered with the IRS as a 501(c)12 cooperative.
SFMIX is proud to be part of an elite group of organizations that operate as a member-owned and operated internet exchanges, including SIX, NWAX, and MICE.
