From Local LANs to a Distributed IX: Lessons from Romania’s Internet Evolution

Romania’s early Internet ecosystem developed in an unusual way. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, users built local Ethernet networks inside apartment buildings and neighbourhoods, initially for gaming, communication and file sharing. As permanent Internet access was expensive and difficult to obtain, these communities began sharing individual connections, and many of the local networks gradually became small Internet service providers.

Several of these operators began interconnecting directly in Bucharest. Without initially knowing how an Internet Exchange was supposed to operate, they created what later became InterLAN-IX. The exchange developed alongside a Romanian telecommunications market that moved from more than one thousand independent ISPs to a highly concentrated market dominated by a small number of national operators.

As regional operators joined the Interlan Association, geographical distance became a practical obstacle. Most meaningful interconnection still took place in Bucharest, while many smaller operators were located hundreds of kilometres away. Rather than creating separate local exchanges with only a few participants, InterLAN-IX extended the same Layer 2 exchange into regional points of presence.

This presentation explains how InterLAN-IX evolved from informal local interconnections into a distributed exchange serving operators across Romania. It examines the operational, geographical and market conditions that shaped this model, the relationship between the association and the exchange, and the lessons learned while maintaining broad participation in an increasingly concentrated telecommunications market.