Eric Băleanu’s two-door model for Romania’s Internet exchange

Summary

Eric Andrei Băleanu traced InterLAN-IX from apartment-block Ethernet networks to a single exchange extended across Romanian cities. The design kept small operators inside one peering system instead of splitting thin regional markets into separate exchanges.
The association that owns InterLAN-IX offers one route to membership for smaller Romanian providers; Băleanu said larger operators connect commercially. The same platform widened access while making long-distance capacity and redundancy a continuing operating cost.

Before the exchange came the neighbourhood network

The Internet exchange came after the neighbourhood network. At RIPE 93, Eric Andrei Băleanu began with people wiring computers between apartments and buildings in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They wanted local chats, games and shared music or films. Those Ethernet networks were community infrastructure before they carried anyone’s Internet connection.

Permanent access was expensive and unreliable, Băleanu recalled. Users began sharing the few fixed connections available across tens or hundreds of people. The neighbourhood LAN became an access network; many of those communities grew into small Internet service providers. When their traffic could move directly between Romanian networks instead of detouring through upstream providers abroad, the next step was to connect the operators to one another.

The regulator’s 2006 annual report gives the scale of that moment. ANRC counted 1,412 active Internet access providers at year-end; 1,402 offered dedicated access, and more than 1,100 had commercial broadband offers. Around 20 Bucharest operators had already begun organizing their interconnections. Băleanu says the name InterLAN came from “interconnecting local area networks.” The association was founded in 2005 with about 20 members and joined Euro-IX in 2008.

Membership and access are different doors

That origin still shows up in the membership line. In Băleanu’s description at RIPE 93, local and small operators could join the association; larger operators could connect to the exchange through commercial agreements. The association owns InterLAN-IX. Its current FAQ describes membership eligibility in more detail: Romanian private capital, an ANCOM provider certificate and annual turnover of up to RON 15 million. The Board reviews an application; the members’ General Assembly decides whether to admit it. Some association services come with more favourable terms for members.

A port and a membership are different things. One buys a path into the exchange; the other opens a place in the association that owns it. That distinction gave the early local operators a formal home around the infrastructure they had built, while leaving room for larger networks to add traffic and reach.

One exchange had to travel farther

Distance forced a second design choice. Networks outside Bucharest could build hundreds of kilometres of transport to the capital or rely on upstream providers to reach the exchange. Both options were expensive. A standalone regional exchange was also a poor fit where only three or four operators and too little traffic would be present. InterLAN instead extended the same Layer 2 platform and peering VLAN through regional points of presence. Băleanu said it had nine Romanian locations at the time of the talk, alongside Frankfurt and Sofia.

He said port prices were the same in Bucharest, Frankfurt and Sofia. That is price parity for the exchange port; it does not pay for the transport between locations. Băleanu said the links need enough capacity and redundancy, and that this adds cost. The design improves access to peering, while latency still depends on the route and operating choices.

For a small operator, the result is a local connection to an exchange whose participants are spread across the country and beyond it. Content networks can reach regional providers through the same platform, and the local networks keep a place in the broader peering system as the national market consolidates. Băleanu’s case is practical: a small pool of peers does not need its own exchange if a shared platform can bring the wider pool closer.

The decisive record still missing is a dated association budget or member resolution that shows who approves and pays for inter-POP capacity and redundancy. That would establish whether formal membership authority follows the cost of keeping one national exchange resilient.