Summary

  • AMS-IX describes itself as "a distributed exchange, currently present at multiple independent colocation facilities in Amsterdam", and the point-of-presence table on its own colocations page displayed fifteen rows when I read it on 11 November 2026.
  • The same operator publishes sixteen datacentres at the 21 February 2023 launch of Data Centre Interconnect, "800+ locations in the world", "300+ EasyAccess locations in Europe" and "1000+ locations worldwide" — five figures, five different denominators, no published crosswalk between them.
  • Its service stops at the local patch panel and the member buys the cross-connect. Its 99.99% availability is described as an aim with no penalty scheme, which arithmetic converts into 52.56 minutes of permitted downtime in a 365-day year.

I read the operator's own pages on 11 November 2026, in one pass, and every figure below is the one that pass displayed. That date matters for a second reason: nothing here is a claim about what AMS-IX's internal records contain, only about what a member, an investor or a competitor can actually see before signing.

The distribution itself is real and documented. The topology page states that the exchange is present at multiple independent colocation facilities in Amsterdam, with one or more access devices at each site, MPLS/VPLS in the current implementation, access devices supporting 10GE, 100GE and 400GE, and photonic cross-connects that can move a member connection to a backup router (AMS-IX Topology). The colocations page adds the sentence that matters commercially: "We house our infrastructure in several data centres with secure and controlled environments," and local access runs over a cross-connect between the customer's or partner's equipment and an AMS-IX patch panel (Colocations).

So the physical exchange is a set of buildings. Now ask the question a buyer asks: which ones, and how many?

Five counts, no crosswalk

The colocation table I inspected listed fifteen rows — NorthC, Digital Realty, Equinix, Iron Mountain, Global Switch, Nikhef, Greenhouse, Smartdc, Eurofiber Cloud Infra among them — and it ranged beyond the city: Amsterdam, Haarlem, Schiphol-Rijk, Naaldwijk and Rotterdam (Colocations). Fifteen is a row count on a page on a date. It is not a definition.

Against that, on 21 February 2023 the operator announced Data Centre Interconnect — a private point-to-point connection between its locations or PoPs, built on a "fully managed and redundant ethernet network" — and said the service was then available for sixteen datacentres in the Amsterdam Metro, Rotterdam and Naaldwijk (Data Centre Interconnect). Sixteen minus fifteen is one, and that arithmetic is the least interesting part of the gap. The interesting part is that neither document states a counting rule, an update date or a scope definition that would let a reader reconcile them.

Then the reach figures arrive with different units. The where-to-connect page says customers can connect "directly or remotely via a partner from 800+ locations in the world" (Where to connect). How to connect splits the same idea into "300+ EasyAccess locations in Europe" and partners reaching "1000+ locations worldwide", and lists the entry prerequisites: an ASN from an Internet Registry, a company extract showing ultimate beneficiary ownership, and portal registration; after contracting, AMS-IX supplies demarcation details, an IP address and configuration instructions, and the customer arranges the cross-connect (How to connect).

Three hundred, eight hundred and a thousand sit in an order that looks like nesting, and they may nest perfectly. What the published text does not do is convert any of them into buildings containing exchange equipment. Partner reach is a commercial-access inventory. Counting it as presence is a category error, and the operator's own pages give a reader no tool to avoid it.

The 52.56 minutes

The quality statement is the document that decides what a member has actually bought. It says the service covers the distributed switching infrastructure from member ports through the local patch panel, and that "the customer is responsible for the necessary cabling between the member's router and the AMS-IX switch patch panel" (Quality Statement). Initial port provisioning is capped at five working days after contractual and colocation conditions are met, in the same document.

And then the availability number. AMS-IX aims for at least 99.99%, and the quality statement itself sets out no penalty scheme. Do the arithmetic the marketing never prints: 99.99% permits 0.01% unavailability; a 365-day year holds 525,600 minutes; 0.01% of that is 52.56 minutes. Run it backwards — 52.56 divided by 525,600 is 0.0001 — and the figure closes. That is a published aim, not a measured outage, not an entitlement, and not a remedy. A member who reads 99.99% as protection has read a target as a contract.

The configuration guide sharpens the same point from the engineering side. It describes a "redundant (virtual) hub & spoke topology" in which 10GE customers reach one of a pair of locally available Ethernet switches through photonic cross-connects, allowing failover within the datacentre (Config guide). Within the datacentre. Local device and local switch redundancy is exactly what that sentence promises, and it is a smaller promise than end-to-end path diversity. The guide's hardware and port descriptions also read older than the current topology page — 1500-byte payload, MTU 1514 untagged or 1518 tagged — so treat its platform detail as historical while its failover scope remains the published statement.

The allowed-traffic rules add the operating constraints that make the fabric a fabric: one source MAC per port, IPv4, ARP and IPv6 EtherTypes only, no proxy ARP, no spanning tree, no discovery protocols, no interior routing protocols on the peering fabric, and the right to disable ports that break the rules (Allowed traffic). None of that tells you which building you are in.

What the terms define, and what they leave open

The 2025 general terms define a colocation as any data-centre premise where AMS-IX services are located, and say networks reach the Interconnect Platform "through diverse means" — direct physical fibre, a remote transport provider, a virtual reseller (General Terms and Conditions). That is a definition of modalities, not a warranty of disjoint routes. Meanwhile the colocations page says services are identical across sites while services, conditions and pricing differ by location, which is the operator telling you to read the local schedule.

The most revealing document is the account of a core move. It lists certification, space, power, cooling and security as hard requirements for a core site, then asks: "Are there enough redundant fiber paths both inside as well as outside the building?" It states that connections to two core nodes must not be crossed anywhere in the network, because that would create a single point of failure, and it says finding routes that supplied the required redundancy took months (Core Move).

Read that twice. The operator treats non-crossing fibre paths as an engineering problem hard enough to consume months. It does not publish those answers as a per-site standard. So the diligence question is not whether AMS-IX cares about path diversity — the story proves it does — but whether any member can obtain the same analysis for the port they are buying.

What a member should actually buy

Buy named premises and a defined demarcation. Specify site A and site B, by legal facility name and address, with the port and patch-panel identifier written into the schedule. Specify which segments are protected: exchange switch, exchange core, meet-me room, duct, fibre, carrier, cross-connect. Require the cross-connect order and its provider to be named, because the cable between your router and the patch panel is yours.

Then convert the aim into a remedy. The measurement point, the period, planned-maintenance treatment, exclusions, restoration times, incident reporting, service credits and a chronic-failure exit all have to sit in the contract, because the public quality statement carries none of them. If a provider will not put a site pair and a penalty behind a resilience claim, the claim was a brochure.

And treat every reach figure as commercial, not physical. "1000+ locations" is a statement about where a partner can hand traffic over. "Fifteen rows" is a statement about where the operator said its infrastructure sits on one Tuesday in November 2026. Only the second kind can be turned into an obligation, and only after someone writes down which of the fifteen is protecting whom.

The exchange is genuinely distributed. The record of its distribution just isn't an inventory yet — and until it is, the member supplies the missing architecture out of their own contract.