With help from Netflix, an Internet exchange that can change the American bandwidth landscape

Netflix signed up as the first customer of a European-style Internet exchange that is launching New York: the AMS-IX, short for the Amsterdam Internet exchange. The news is not just that some pond-hopping internet exchange has a big name customer -- it’s also the first internet exchange on the planet to adopt a new set of rules of standards from the Open-IX initiative. There are two really important things going on here: the launch of a Netflix-led open internet exchange model called Open-IX, as well as the growth of the European internet exchange model here in the US. Both elements could increase competition in the market dominated by companies like Equinix, Telx and CoreSite and perhaps lower prices for the buyers of bandwidth in the US. Those buyers could be everyone from Google and Netflix to transit providers like Level 3 or ISPs like Comcast or AT&T. For the consumer, these costs are hidden, but making the market for bandwidth more efficient is something that benefits everyone in the long term.