Pacific’s Connectivity Hub. Region’s Content Capital?

The Pacific island of Guam recently increased its and the region’s Internet resilience by welcoming its fourth Internet Exchange Point (IXP), Guam Exchange (Guam IX).

With a population of around 170,000 and 10 local networks, four IXPs can rightly be considered excessive. However, Guam IX is broadening its traditional IXP services to accommodate the evolving Internet architecture and Guam’s growing reputation as the Internet hub of the Pacific and a new gateway to Asia.

Location, Location, Location

The above mantra has been associated with the real estate industry for over a century and is increasingly becoming one for the Internet —specifically, the location of critical infrastructure and popular content to end users.

As we near the performance limitations of fiber optic cables and wireless technology, it stands to reason that users who are closer to the content (or a more direct, robust route to the content) they want can access it quicker than users further away.

As such, popular content providers such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have sought to create caches of popular content and store them worldwide. They have also invested heavily in regional data centers and subsea cables, which help them expand and update these caches and provide end users with more direct access to their live cloud and streaming services.

The importance of this infrastructure, and equally the caches, was on display earlier this year when multiple subsea cables were cut on Africa’s West and East coasts. While Internet users in many affected countries could not access video conferencing or international cloud services, predominantly hosted in Europe and North America, the caches at least allowed them to access popular stored content. 

Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) helped access these caches and allowed local Internet traffic to continue being routed.

An IXP is a physical place, sometimes inside a data center, where different networks interconnect and send traffic to one another. This is known as peering and makes Internet services faster, more reliable, and cheaper. Learn more about how IXPs make the Internet faster and more affordable.

This local-level Internet architecture not only provides redundancy during outages but also reduces the cost of Internet services and increases performance in cases that would have required traffic transiting outside of the country or region.

Build It, And They Will Come?

Returning to Guam, the tiny Pacific island has become increasingly important for growing the Internet in the Pacific and South East Asia over the past decade. 

More Internet traffic moves through Guam via its 12 submarine cables than much larger Asian and Pacific countries, including Bangladesh (2 submarine cables), Viet Nam (5), Fiji (6), Sri Lanka (8), and South Korea (9). And more cables are on the way, with another seven to be connected by 2026, including Meta and Google-led Echo, Bifrost and Apricot cables, and the Asia Connect Cable.

“Guam has done an outstanding job establishing international routes and developing its local network infrastructure,” says Jose Dante Santiago, Guam IX’s Senior Manager of Interconnection Strategy.

“Guam IX will offer traditional IXP services to local and regional networks, which will provide redundancy to those networks already connected to one of the other IXPs,” explains Jose, adding that they have enabled an open access policy allowing all fiber operators access without any surcharges or bureaucratic hurdles thanks to the carrier neutrality approach and geologically diverse fiber paths to the different cable landing stations.

“But as a commercial IXP, we want to attract content delivery networks [CDNs] and other digital service providers to establish a point of presence in the data center we’ve also built. Hosting these services will reduce latency and make the Internet more affordable for Guam and our neighboring islands.”

Currently, one-third of the top 1,000 most accessed websites by Guam Internet users are hosted in the country, predominantly by Cloudflare and Akamai. 

This is relatively good compared to other Pacific Small Island Developing States, with New Caledonia the only country with a significant amount of locally hosted popular content. What is interesting about the following graph is the lack of regionally hosted content, that is, content hosted in one country and accessible by its neighbors. This is where Guam and other major island hubs have an opportunity to improve Internet performance and resilience in the region.

Resilience Comes in Many Forms

Connectivity and content locality aside, variable environmental and climatic challenges are increasingly becoming important considerations for increasing the resilience of the Internet locally and regionally. This is particularly so for Pacific countries facing greater risk of sea-level rise and stronger tropical storms.

Jose says he lent on his experience establishing one of Guam’s other two active IXPs—Mariana Islands Internet Exchange (MARIIX)—when designing and developing Guam IX with these factors in mind.

“We chose a location for the data center and IXP that is 33 meters above sea level and is protected by a natural hillside,” explains Jose. “Given that we are also along the Pacific Ring of Fire, our critical equipment and infrastructure is seismically rated and supported against earthquakes.”

“I also learned a lot from my time at MARIIX about the importance of developing relationships with IXP members, which is just as important as the technical know-how if you want to create a sustainable ecosystem.”

Learn how the Internet Society works to keep half of all Internet traffic local in selected economies by 2025.