Balkan Internet Exchange List 2026: 13 IXPs, Who Runs Each One, and What Our Traces From Amsterdam Show

A Balkan internet exchange is a shared switch where the networks of one country or city hand traffic to each other directly, instead of sending it to Vienna or Frankfurt and back. On 18 October 2026, PeeringDB listed 33 exchange records in the 11 countries of South East Europe, from NetIX in Sofia with 136 connected networks to national exchanges with a handful, such as MIXP.me in Montenegro with 2. The one actually named Balkan Internet Exchange, B-IX, is also in Sofia and has 55. Kosovo has one exchange, KOSIX, run by the telecom regulator, with 6 networks. North Macedonia has IXP.mk in Skopje with 17, and RS Computers (AS213900) is one of them, with a 100G port and an open peering policy. That port is part of our IP transit in Skopje.

This guide lists the main exchange in each of the 11 countries plus the big hubs, 13 in all, with who runs each one. It explains peering in plain words and shows what we measured when we traced paths from Amsterdam to each exchange.

Key facts, checked on 18 October 2026:

• The three largest exchanges in the region by connected networks are NetIX (136) and BIX.BG (128) in Sofia and InterLAN-IX (124) in Bucharest, according to PeeringDB. BIX.BG's own site showed a traffic peak of 1.48 Tbit/s on 13 October 2026 (BIX.BG).
• KOSIX is the only exchange in South East Europe run by a regulator, ARKEP, and national providers that sell transit must join it (RIPE NCC report on South East European IXPs, October 2025).
• The same report counts 32 networks (ASNs) registered in Kosovo and 67 in North Macedonia. PeeringDB listed 6 networks at KOSIX, two of them foreign, and 17 at IXP.mk.
• In our mtr test from Amsterdam on 18 October 2026, the server that hosts the ixp.mk website in Skopje answered in 40.6 ms, after a detour through five countries. The sox.rs web server in Belgrade, only 276 km closer to Amsterdam, answered in 28.8 ms.

Balkan internet exchange list: 13 IXPs by country

"Networks" is PeeringDB's count on 18 October 2026. PeeringDB's 33 regional records also include separate entries such as GR-IX Thessaloniki and NetIX Greece; the table keeps to the main exchange of each country plus the large hubs in Sofia and Bucharest.

Exchanges often report more members on their own sites, because not every member keeps a PeeringDB entry. GR-IX lists 76 members in Athens against 67 in PeeringDB, and BIX.BG lists 139 public peers against 128.

Sources: PeeringDB for network counts, operators and sites; the RIPE NCC report for founding years, governance models, registered networks and remote sites; the GR-IX and BIX.BG sites for their own figures.

Searching for the exchange called Balkan Internet Exchange? That is B-IX in Sofia, run by an operator of the same name, with 55 networks in PeeringDB on 18 October 2026. By network count it is smaller than NetIX (136) and BIX.BG (128) in the same city. PeeringDB lists B-IX in five Sofia data centres plus Bucharest, Frankfurt and Thessaloniki. Do not confuse it with Balcan-IX in Bucharest, a separate exchange run by Orange Romania with 29 networks. The rest of this guide uses "Balkan internet exchange" in the wider sense: any IXP in the region.

Sofia and Bucharest are the real hubs, with more than 100 networks each, including foreign content and cloud companies. The national exchanges of Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia have between 2 and 17 networks, and most large international networks are absent. The RIPE NCC does not expect many new exchanges in the region, because the market looks saturated and local connectivity is concentrated in a few large operators.

What is an internet exchange point? Peering, transit and route servers in plain words

An internet exchange point (IXP) is a switch, or a few linked switches, in one or more data centres, where networks plug in and swap traffic directly. Five more terms explain why that matters.

Every network on the internet has a number, the ASN (autonomous system number); ours is 213900. Networks tell each other which addresses they can reach with a routing protocol called BGP, and there are two ways to get those routes.

Transit is the paid way: a carrier announces your addresses to the whole internet and gives you a path to every other network. Peering is a swap: two networks send each other traffic for their own customers only, usually for free, which is called settlement-free peering. Peering never gives you the whole internet.

An exchange makes peering cheap. Each member plugs in one port and gets an address on a shared network called the peering LAN. At IXP.mk our router is 185.1.121.120, on the same LAN as Cloudflare, Hurricane Electric and the Macedonian ISPs.

A route server saves you from setting up a BGP session with every member. It collects the routes of every member connected to it and passes them on to the others, while the traffic itself still goes straight across the switch. IXP.mk's route servers are AS56507 at 185.1.121.1 and 185.1.121.2, and PeeringDB flags 15 of its 17 networks as route server users.

A direct session between two members is called bilateral. A network's peering policy says who it peers with: "open" means anyone on a shared exchange, "selective" means on request with conditions.

Which big carriers peer at which Balkan exchanges is covered in our comparison of Hurricane Electric and Cogent for Balkan networks. For transit in both our cities, see the IP transit overview.

Is there an internet exchange in Kosovo? What KOSIX is and is not

Yes. KOSIX in Prishtina went live in 2011 and is run by ARKEP, Kosovo's telecom regulator. A test shown at the RIPE NCC regional meeting that year compared two Kosovo ISPs before and after: their traffic had gone through a carrier abroad in 13 hops at about 163 ms, and over KOSIX it took 7 hops at about 14 ms (KOSIX presentation, 2011).

Fifteen years later, PeeringDB shows a small exchange. On 18 October 2026 it listed six networks: Artmotion, IPKO, KujtesaNET, TelKos and two networks of Packet Clearing House, a non-profit that runs DNS infrastructure. All six ports are 10 Gbit/s, no route server appears in the member list, and no member lists an IPv6 address on the exchange.

ARKEP created the current KOSIX record in PeeringDB on 1 June 2026. Hurricane Electric, Cloudflare and the other international networks seen in Skopje are not on it.

The RIPE NCC notes that a regulator can give an exchange credibility where ISPs do not trust each other, but that government processes slow change and make it hard to build an active community. It also found that smaller markets such as Kosovo and Albania lean on hubs in neighbouring countries.

Our traces agree. When we traced the website of a Kosovo ISP from Amsterdam, Hurricane Electric carried the packets through Frankfurt and Vienna to its router in Skopje, reached in 32.1 ms, and handed them there to Artmotion, a Kosovo network, at 32.6 ms. The interconnection point for that Kosovo traffic was Skopje, not Prishtina. For a server inside Kosovo itself, see our VPS in Kosovo page.

IXP.mk in Skopje: who peers on North Macedonia's exchange

IXP.mk is run by the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering (FINKI) of Ss. Cyril and Methodius University. It was set up in June 2018. In 2020 the Internet Society funded a switch and two fibre multiplexers, and a second site opened in the Telesmart Telekom data centre (Internet Society, March 2021). PeeringDB now lists three sites: the faculty, the university rectorate and Telesmart. The 17 networks on it on 18 October 2026:

• Telecom operators, ISPs and content networks: Telesmart Telekom, Neotel, A1 Makedonija, Softnet, Interspace, Go Net, datacom-jv and BIDI IN V.I.B.
• International networks: Cloudflare (on a 20 Gbit/s port), Hurricane Electric, the RIPE NCC's K-root DNS servers and two Packet Clearing House networks.
• The university's own network, the exchange's route servers and a BGP.Tools route collector.
• RS Computers, AS213900.

The RIPE NCC report adds a local reason to join: North Macedonia's National Health System is hosted at the same faculty as the exchange, so ISPs that peer there give their users a short path to it.

Our port on IXP.mk is 100G and our policy is open: we take routes from the IXP.mk route servers and set up a bilateral session with any member that asks. Customers of our Skopje IP transit reach the exchange members over that port, so their traffic to Macedonian networks stays in Skopje, and Prishtina is about 3 ms away on our own network.

Networks in Kosovo or Albania without equipment in Skopje can connect over a tunnel; our guide to running BGP over a GRE, WireGuard, IPsec or VXLAN tunnel shows how.

Latency from Amsterdam to Kosovo, Skopje and the Balkans: what our traces show

We ran these tests on 18 October 2026 from a Debian 13 container (Incus, 1 GiB of memory, 2 vCPU) on our Amsterdam test server. That server's upstream is GSL at Nikhef, so the paths below are ordinary public internet routes; they do not pass through our Skopje PoP.

The tool is mtr, which repeats a traceroute and shows the delay at every hop. Exchange peering LANs are usually not routed on the public internet, so we traced each exchange's own website and checked where it is really hosted.

# as root inside the Debian 13 container
apt-get update
apt-get install -y mtr-tiny traceroute iputils-ping curl dnsutils jq
ping -c 10 -i 0.3 -q 194.149.137.108
mtr -4 -rwzbc 10 194.149.137.108

The ping line sends 10 pings, 0.3 seconds apart, and prints only the summary. The mtr flags mean IPv4, report mode, wide output, AS numbers, names plus IPs, and 10 probes per hop. The target is the ixp.mk web server at FINKI. These are the hops that matter, condensed from our log to one line per place (not raw mtr output):

# condensed from our mtr report: hop, network, where, best round trip
 3-5  AS7578   GSL      Amsterdam, Nikhef     0.6 ms
 7    AS174    Cogent   Amsterdam             1.0 ms
 8    AS174    Cogent   Frankfurt             7.4 ms
 9    AS174    Cogent   Munich               12.7 ms
10    AS174    Cogent   Vienna               19.1 ms
11    AS174    Cogent   Bratislava           19.6 ms
12    AS174    Cogent   Budapest             22.0 ms
16    AS21320  GEANT    Sofia                36.4 ms
18    AS5379   MARnet   North Macedonia      40.2 ms
21    AS52188  FINKI    194.149.137.108      40.6 ms

Cogent carried the packets from Amsterdam through Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest to GEANT, the European research network, in Sofia, and only then into MARnet, the Macedonian academic network.

The kosix.net, cix.hr and mixp.me web servers did not answer ping at all. For servers that drop ping, trace over TCP port 443 instead:

# as root: TCP mode for a host that drops ICMP (kosix.net)
mtr -4 -T -P 443 -rwzbc 10 80.80.161.82

The last hop, 80.80.161.82 in AS21246, answered in 37.8 ms at best. So the KOSIX website is hosted at IPKO in Kosovo, and our packets reached it through Inter.link (AS5405) via Ljubljana. All results:

Three things in this table are worth knowing before you test your own routes:

• A ping to a website tells you where the website is hosted, not where the exchange is. The NetIX and DE-CIX sites sit behind Cloudflare and answered in under 1 ms, so always check the AS number on the last hop.
• Distance alone does not decide latency. Belgrade is 1,416 km from Amsterdam and Skopje 1,692 km, a gap worth about 3 ms on straight fibre, yet Skopje was almost 12 ms slower because the path detoured through Sofia.
• Frankfurt or Vienna showed up in the ixp.mk, bix.bg, interlan.ro and Kosovo ISP traces, and the ixp.mk trace also passed Sofia. That matches the RIPE NCC finding that Vienna, Frankfurt and Sofia are the region's key interconnection gateways.

Latency from Amsterdam to Kosovo on our own servers: on 6 October 2026, the public tool ping.pe measured our Prishtina server at 37.2 ms from Amsterdam, 27.8 ms from Frankfurt and 18.6 ms from Vienna. These are the figures published on our Kosovo VPS page, and Skopje is about 3 ms from Prishtina on our own network.

Check an exchange's members yourself

PeeringDB is the public database where networks and exchanges publish their peering details. Its API is free and needs no account:

# as any user, with curl and jq installed
curl -s "https://www.peeringdb.com/api/ix?country__in=MK,XK,AL" | jq -r '.data[] | [.name, .city, .net_count] | @tsv'
curl -s "https://www.peeringdb.com/api/netixlan?ix_id=2276&asn=213900" | jq -r '.data[] | [.asn, .ipaddr4, .ipaddr6, .is_rs_peer] | @tsv'

What we saw: ANIX Tirana 26, IXP.mk Skopje 17 and KOSIX Pristine 6, then 213900 185.1.121.120 2001:7f8:cb:dcbb::20 true, where the last column shows that we use the IXP.mk route servers. The Internet Society's Pulse IXP tracker charts the same PeeringDB data over time.

Why local peering lowers latency and cost

Light in fibre needs about 4.9 microseconds per kilometre, so every 100 km of cable adds roughly 1 ms to a round trip (M2 Optics). Two ISPs in Prishtina that swap traffic in Vienna send each packet about 720 km out in a straight line and the same distance back. Over a local exchange it travels a few kilometres, which is what the 163 ms to 14 ms drop in the 2011 KOSIX test showed.

Local peering also saves paid transit capacity, and it keeps traffic between two local networks flowing when an international link or a foreign carrier fails.

Parts of the region already do this well. In Romania, only 1.88% of 1,544 paths measured between local probes left the country, according to the RIPE NCC. Its tests to content hosted at regional exchanges generally stayed below 20 ms, with the weaker results in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro: the three markets with the smallest exchanges in the table above.

An exchange does not replace transit. It only gives you routes to its members, and when a peer goes down your traffic to it falls back to transit. Most networks use both: peering for local routes, transit for the rest. IP transit in Skopje from a network that peers openly at IXP.mk gives you both on one port.

Which plan and city fit your network

VPS plans (Nano, Micro, Mini) use shared vCPUs; VDS plans (Small, Medium, Large) use dedicated vCPUs. Every plan has NVMe storage, unmetered traffic and its own IPv4 and IPv6, and you can upgrade later from the client area with a short reboot. Availability by city is on the plans page. Transit in our second city is on the IP transit in Amsterdam page.

No ASN yet? Our guide to getting your own ASN and IP addresses walks through the RIPE steps; RS Computers is a RIPE NCC member and sponsors ASNs for clients directly. Leased IPv4 is accepted for transit when its IRR route object and ROA match your ASN, and our guide on how to announce leased IPv4 with an LOA, route object and ROA covers that paperwork.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Balkan Internet Exchange?

The name is used in two ways. B-IX, run by an operator called Balkan Internet Exchange, is an IXP in Sofia, Bulgaria, with 55 networks in PeeringDB on 18 October 2026. More broadly, a Balkan internet exchange is any of the 33 exchange records PeeringDB lists in the 11 countries of South East Europe; the largest by networks are NetIX (136) and BIX.BG (128) in Sofia and InterLAN-IX (124) in Bucharest.

Is there an internet exchange in Kosovo?

Yes. KOSIX in Prishtina has run since 2011 and is operated by ARKEP, Kosovo's telecom regulator. On 18 October 2026 PeeringDB listed 6 networks on it: Artmotion, IPKO, KujtesaNET, TelKos and two Packet Clearing House networks, all on 10 Gbit/s ports. National providers that sell transit must join.

What is IXP.mk?

IXP.mk is North Macedonia's internet exchange, run by the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering (FINKI) of Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. It was set up in June 2018 and listed 17 networks in PeeringDB on 18 October 2026, including Cloudflare, Hurricane Electric, the K-root DNS servers and RS Computers (AS213900).

What is the difference between peering and IP transit?

Peering is a usually free exchange of traffic between two networks for their own customers only, often over an internet exchange. IP transit is a paid service in which a carrier announces your addresses to the whole internet and gives you routes to every network. Most networks use peering for local routes and transit for everything else.

What is the latency from Kosovo to Amsterdam?

On 6 October 2026, ping.pe measured 37.2 ms from Amsterdam to the RS Computers server in Prishtina, 27.8 ms from Frankfurt and 18.6 ms from Vienna. On 18 October 2026 we measured 37.8 ms from Amsterdam to the KOSIX website, hosted at IPKO in Kosovo. Your own result depends on your ISP's route.

Do I need my own ASN to join an internet exchange?

Yes, in almost every case. According to the RIPE NCC, most exchanges in the region ask only for an ASN, your own IP address space and an upstream connection; KOSIX also needs the regulator's approval. Without an ASN you can still benefit by buying transit from a network that peers at the exchange.

Peer close to your users

Every Balkan country has an exchange, but the big ones are in Sofia and Bucharest, and in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro the national exchanges are still small, so their traffic often meets in a neighbouring country. For networks in Kosovo, Skopje is the nearest well-connected point: 77 km from Prishtina, with Cloudflare, Hurricane Electric and the Macedonian carriers on IXP.mk. Networks in Albania can reach it by tunnel.

Our IP transit in Skopje gives you flat-rate, unmetered, month-to-month transit with the BGP session included and upstreams including Hurricane Electric and GSL, plus open peering at IXP.mk on our 100G port, by cross-connect or tunnel. Send your ASN and the prefixes you want to announce on Telegram, and we will tell you which delivery option fits.

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