AS7615 BTIX-AS-AP Bhutan Internet Exchange

BTIX-AS-AP is the Bhutan Internet Exchange, the national internet exchange point for Bhutan. AS7615 is the exchange's own infrastructure ASN, not a service-provider network.

What it's used for

• Exchange fabric and supporting services. It announces a single IPv4 /24, 103.129.63.0/24, and 2001:dea:4001::/48. Reverse DNS in the /24 resolves to exchange infrastructure such as ns1.btix.bt.
• An IXP exists so that Bhutanese networks can hand traffic to each other locally instead of hairpinning it through transit providers in India or Singapore. Its own address space carries route servers, name servers, management and peering-LAN infrastructure.

Notable

• This is not classified into any customer kind. An IXP has no eyeballs, no hosting tenants and no transit customers of its own; the addresses belong to the exchange's own machines. Treating this space as hosting, transit or ISP would be wrong in each case.
• Volume is tiny by design. A /24 is a normal footprint for a national exchange, and the address count says nothing about how much traffic crosses the fabric.

Interesting

• Bhutan is a small, landlocked market with no direct submarine-cable landing, so all international transit is bought overland. That makes local peering disproportionately valuable: an IXP is one of the few ways to keep domestic traffic domestic and off expensive cross-border circuits.