EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Future Starts Now

Background: The Internet was designed to provide continuous communication across the country on a normal day, as well as during time of crisis, war, natural disaster, etc. They did this by focusing on physics and making all participant’s Autonomous Systems using a protocol called BGP which stands for Border Gateway Protocol. The entire Internet functions today because of BGP, Autonomous Systems, their AS numbers, and a bunch of nerds who understand how it works. We are some of those nerds.

Problem: State and Federal Governments have spent hundreds of billions, probably trillions, of tax payer funds on the Internet and all things that go with it. The biggest spend has been on fiber. Most fiber in the ground was paid for by taxpayers, yet in 90% of the cases those fiber “roads” are only used to create protected, private, and proprietary networks that are heavily tolled and taxed, defeating the purpose of Government/Tax funded infrastructure.

The Analogy: Every road in the USA is a toll road, and many of those roads are not standardized, not well maintained, and travel a very long way before you can get on another road. This is extremely inefficient and expensive. The secondary problem is that most of these roads converge in data centers, so if you aren’t in a Data center due to costs, distance, or other factors, you are not using the Internet like it was designed to work. While this statement is 100% accurate of today’s Internet this was not the intent of the original designers. The original intent was to create an equally available decentralized network. Over time the Internet has evolved into a tier one / data-center-centric model that limits efficient growth into rural and underserved markets. Our solution reverses this trend and creates the truly open decentralized network the Internet founders intended, and Alabama needs to move the needle.

Solution: Most Internet Exchange Points, or IXP networks are singularly focused on providing local packet swap directly between participants in one or more data centers. This model and all of the countless nerds working on it has improved the Internet dramatically in the last few years. It is time for this model to evolve, to act locally. IXP FARM to the rescue. Utilizing commodity hardware and industry standards in an open access environment by deploying IXPs within 10km of every citizen is our goal. Doing good with all that we have is our mission! Using a full BGP mesh of IXP like clusters in 200+ locations across Alabama, IXP FARM will bring Alabama from #47 to #1 in connectivity in a matter of years. The solution is extremely cost-effective, extensively scalable, and provides exponential resiliency unmatched by any other carrier or network. These are not just IXP route servers. The IXP FARM mesh includes full Internet tables, routers with multi-hundreds of GB of capacity,
and continues to scale simply by adding more nodes in a cluster, and more clusters in the network.

About: The IXP FARM was originally conceived as CityNet and HealthNet by Marcus Holt (City of Montgomery, MGM-IX) and Mike Francis (JMF Solutions, Distributed Ledger). The idea was eventually presented to partners Dennis Leonard and Peyton McNully. After a year of evolution, discussions with legislature and government representatives, planning, design, and a lot more nerd work, we launched IXP FARM LLC.

Why a Private Company: The original idea was to form a non-profit and to build public/private partnerships. While working with our partners and legal counsel, the decision was made that IXP FARM could better serve everyone, be far more flexible, more open, and more accessible by using a private company to build and manage it. In all of our companies, which have been INC 5000 nine times, we put family first who put our clients first, which serves our mission of doing good with all that we have been provided.

Team: Marcus Holt, Mike Francis, Tommy Vardell, Peyton McNully