Summary

  • InterLAN Internet Exchange SRL (InterLAN-IX) presents itself as a private company with Romanian capital, wholly owned by the Interlan Association, a non-profit organisation of Romanian Internet access service providers, headquartered in Bucharest (InterLAN-IX).
  • The operator states it carries more than 180 autonomous system numbers and more than 2.6 Tbps of connected capacity, with a daily traffic peak above 1 Tbps, across 17 interconnection locations (InterLAN-IX).
  • The Romanian Network Operators Group describes the same exchange as founded in 2005, with 18 points of presence in Romania plus Frankfurt and Sofia, over 150 operators and traffic above 600 Gbps (RONOG).
  • The two accounts diverge by roughly a factor of two on traffic and by tens of networks on membership, and neither states the measurement date behind its own figures.

What the exchange says about itself

InterLAN-IX's own site gives the operator's account. It describes InterLAN Internet Exchange SRL as a private company with Romanian capital, wholly owned by the Interlan Association, a non-profit organisation of Internet access service providers in Romania, headquartered in Bucharest (InterLAN-IX). The same page states the exchange has been a full member of Euro-IX since 2008 and a full member of RIPE NCC since 2015 (InterLAN-IX).

The footprint claim is specific. InterLAN-IX lists 17 interconnection locations, with national points of presence in Bucharest, Constanța, Timișoara, Craiova, Arad, Cluj-Napoca, Iași, Suceava, Târgu Secuiesc and Gheorgheni, plus international points of presence in Frankfurt, Germany, and Sofia, Bulgaria (InterLAN-IX).

The scale claim is also specific. The operator states its connected platform carries more than 180 autonomous system numbers, more than 2.6 Tbps of connected capacity and a daily traffic peak above 1 Tbps, and that it hosts six DNS root-server instances — D, E, F, K, L and M (InterLAN-IX). On the physical layer, it describes Ethernet switches interconnected over 10 Gbps and 40/100 Gbps backbones, hosted in colocation data centres, with 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps interfaces offered for connection (InterLAN-IX).

The same exchange, described differently

The Romanian Network Operators Group gives a second account of the same platform. It describes InterLAN-IX as established in 2005 by a Romanian association of telecom operators as a neutral internet exchange point, operating 18 points of presence in Romania and additionally in Frankfurt and Sofia, supporting over 150 operators from Romania and beyond, with traffic exceeding 600 Gbps (RONOG).

Set against the operator's page, the two descriptions differ on three of the four headline quantities. The operator reports 180+ autonomous systems; RONOG reports 150+ operators — close enough to be a rounding difference, but the underlying units are not the same thing. The operator reports 17 interconnection locations; RONOG reports 18 points of presence in Romania plus the two international sites. The operator reports a daily peak above 1 Tbps; RONOG reports traffic exceeding 600 Gbps. Neither source states the date or the method behind its figure (InterLAN-IX, RONOG).

The membership-count difference is the least interesting of the three, because an operator count and an autonomous-system count are different measures taken at different moments. The traffic difference is the more consequential one: 1 Tbps peak and 600 Gbps sustained describe two different fabrics, and a capacity buyer pricing a port in Bucharest would want to know which one is being sold.

Why the gap has a commercial edge

InterLAN-IX does not hold Romania's metro interconnection market alone. DE-CIX lists Bucharest, Romania, among the locations from which networks can connect to its interconnection platform, alongside more than 60 locations and 4,600+ connected networks globally (DE-CIX). A network deciding how to reach Romanian eyeballs therefore has at least two commercial routes into the same city: a domestic exchange whose membership is concentrated in Romanian access providers, and an international platform with a much larger connected base and a Bucharest point of presence.

That comparison is where the numbers stop being marketing and start being procurement inputs. An exchange's value to a prospective member is a function of how many of the networks it needs to reach are already present, and what it costs to reach the ones that are not. On InterLAN-IX's own account, that means more than 180 autonomous systems reachable locally, six root-server instances hosted on the platform, and interfaces up to 100 Gbps (InterLAN-IX). On RONOG's account, it means 150+ operators and more than 600 Gbps (RONOG). Both are consistent with a substantial domestic fabric; neither lets a buyer size the fabric precisely.

The reference layer compounds the problem. PeeringDB, the database most operators check when deciding where to interconnect, is freely available but user-maintained, non-profit and volunteer-run (PeeringDB). Its value depends on participants updating their own records. For an exchange, that means the observable footprint in the industry's shared reference is partly a function of its own housekeeping — and a discrepancy between a marketing page and a community description is exactly the kind of thing that erodes the reference layer's usefulness.

What is actually established

Established: InterLAN-IX is a Romanian exchange operated by a Bucharest company owned by a non-profit association of Romanian access providers, with a national footprint spanning ten named cities and international points of presence in Frankfurt and Sofia, and membership in Euro-IX and RIPE NCC (InterLAN-IX). Established: RONOG's eleventh meeting was hosted by InterLAN in Bucharest on 29 September 2026, which confirms an active, current domestic operator community around the exchange (RONOG).

Not established: which of the two traffic figures describes the platform today, how either figure was measured, and whether the member counts refer to the same population. The operator's site and RONOG's page both describe the exchange from within the Romanian operator community, and no independent filing or regulator document was retrieved here to corroborate the ownership structure or the legal form. The ownership and legal-form claims therefore rest on the operator's own account (InterLAN-IX).

For now, the defensible reading is that InterLAN-IX is a genuinely national exchange with a real and named physical footprint, whose published scale is stated in ranges that a prospective member cannot convert into a decision. The useful next observable is a dated, method-attached capacity figure — from the exchange or from the reference databases its members use. Until then, the gap between the two accounts is the finding. The directory entry for the operator is InterLAN Internet Exchange SRL.