How we built a transit network in Frankfurt and Milan

ShadowIP is a small network operator with its own autonomous system, AS218995, and two points of presence: Frankfurt and Milan.

Frankfurt covers Germany and central Europe. Milan covers Italy and southern Europe. The network is not a global carrier, and it does not pretend to be one. Those two locations are where European traffic is concentrated enough to reach the exchanges that matter for this footprint.

From Frankfurt, the published paths are 3 ms to AMS-IX and 2 ms to DE-CIX. From Milan, the published path to MIX-IT is 4 ms. Between the PoPs, Frankfurt to Milan is 6 ms. Coverage of LINX and smaller exchanges is part of the same description. A separate latency is not published for each of them.

Upstreams are multi-homed, so the network is not tied to a single upstream. Traffic beyond the two PoPs is one hop away via those upstreams. Prefixes are validated automatically. IPv6 is native from day one. Bandwidth is described as unmetered on every tier.

The free tier and the paid tiers sit on this same network. What changes between them is port speed, the number of BGP sessions, and what each plan lists.