Want to connect to SFMIX in the Bay Area? Here’s how.

Steps for Connecting

• SFMIX began charging annual membership fees in 2017 (after over a decade of free service to the community). The fees were revised in late 2022 to adjust for inflation and growing infrastructure costs. As of 2023, the fees are:
  • $995/year for a single 1Gbps port (multiples of 1Gbps are discouraged)
  • $2995/year per a 10Gbps port (maximum of 4 ports)
  • $7495/year per a 100Gbps port (no restrictions on quantity)
  • Exemptions to these fees are made on a case by case basis and subject to approval from the board. Typically exemptions are granted to non-profits that contribute an in-kind service of equal value to all other participants, such as global ccTLD/gTLD or root server operators.
• Billing is on an annual basis – generally at the beginning of the calendar year, monthly bills is not available. All pricing is in US dollars.
• Acknowledge all logistical and technical requirements below.
• SFMIX only supports single-mode fiber connections.
• Email tech-c@sfmix.org to confirm availability in your desired connection location.
• Fill out the Membership Application Form.
• SFMIX will issue an LOA/CFA authorization document for a new cross-connection link to be ordered.
• Upon link up, SFMIX will issue a v4 & v6 allocation. New participants may be placed in a quarantined network segment for initial turn-up or debugging.
• Configure the required looking glass BGP sessions and optional route server sessions.
• Start passing traffic!

Logistical Requirements

• Participants are required to have at least one organization representative subscribed to the sfmix-members mailing list. Role accounts are encouraged for wide advertisement of any planned or unscheduled work. Please email tech-c@sfmix.org with all subscription requests.
• Correspondence or discussions on the SFMIX mailing lists are considered confidential to participants, members, and sponsors.
• SFMIX is a non-profit, all volunteer run organization. No SLA or service guarantees are implied – all services are considered best effort.
• Participants may only peer at a single location, regardless of the number of physical or logical ports. The SFMIX peering fabric is built on significant donated connectivity, physical space, power, and additional infrastructure, with the express intention as a peering fabric and not a transport or carrier replacement.
• Participants may not sniff traffic between other participants

Technical Requirements

• Participants must utilize an ASN (autonomous system number) that is allocated by an RIR (regional internet registry), such as ARIN. Private or reserve ASN’s are not acceptable – as specified by RFC 1930 or RFC 6996.
• A single source MAC address is allowed per a participant physical port or logical link aggregation grouping. Additional sourced MAC addresses are forbidden.
• No broadcast traffic (such as CDP, LLDP, DHCP, STP) is allowed over the IX fabric, except IPv4 ARP neighbor discovery.
• All participants are required to setup a BGP session with the SFMIX looking glass server. This service is utilized purely for debugging purposes; no traffic is exchanged over this peering session.
• Participants must not allow SFMIX subnets to propagate externally from their network and should minimize internal propagation as much as able. If a participant’s network beyond their SFMIX edge router(s) can reach the SFMIX subnet addresses (206.197.187.0/24 and 2001:504:30::/64), ACLs are requested in order to prevent this.
• Participants may not point default or otherwise use another participant’s or SFMIX’s resources without permission
• Participants are encouraged to utilize the SFMIX route servers, where appropriate for their organization traffic engineering policies. These peering relationships help facilitate immediate value for new members of the exchange. No MLPA or peering with the route servers is required.