As digitalization is happening at an unprecedented pace across all industries and facets of our lives—including, but not limited to, automobile, finance, academia, banking, healthcare, and hospitality—it is crucial that the Internet’s underlying infrastructure is able to support and sustain this continued rapid growth. Fortunately, the Internet is not controlled by any one governing body, so we must ensure there is adequate infrastructure in all corners of the world to support such mission-critical expansion in an equitable, consistent way.
The Internet Ecosystem Innovation Committee (IEIC) is an independent committee working to propel the digital economy in both local and global ways by creating more sustainable, supportive, and diverse interconnection infrastructure. It promotes Internet diversity by forming global Internet nexus points and utilizes innovation and influence within the committee’s collective participants and industries to harden Internet infrastructure geographically and ensure the Internet will continue to stimulate economic development opportunities in communities around the globe.
On November 8th, 2022, IEIC organized the IEIC Global NAP Summit 2.0 in Henrico, Virginia. The speakers included over 35 industry luminaries from six continents across the entire spectrum of digital infrastructure, including data centers, subsea cables, terrestrial fiber, Internet Exchange, and various other networking companies, and from both public and private sectors. With the goal of understanding, forecasting, and strategizing about the digital infrastructure of the future, these market leaders shared their views and perspectives on the importance of Internet diversification, bridging the digital divide, and encouraging public/private collaboration, as well as how the development of digital infrastructure can be the catalyst of regional economic growth.
Key topics of discussion included:
- Why resilient, diverse, decentralized Internet infrastructure matters;
- The rapidly evolving global infrastructure landscape and future potential global Internet hubs;
- The importance of latency, Edge data centers, and cloud security;
- Digital-infrastructure-driven economic growth;
- Accelerating digitization across multiple industries;
- Why subsea cables are a catalyst of the digital economy; and
- The impact of underlying digital infrastructure on new technologies like AI and the IoT.
The summit also culminated in the ribbon cutting and reception for DE-CIX Richmond, the world’s largest data center-neutral and carrier-neutral Internet Exchange that offers multi-service interconnection services.
“We are thrilled to bring our platform to this very important market, supporting the further digital transformation of Virginia,” said Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX. “Not only traditional network providers, but also enterprises—in Virginia and beyond—are in search of simplified, flexible, secure, and high-performance solutions that support their connectivity needs in an agile manner, now and for the future. DE-CIX Richmond delivers robust and low-latency connectivity to clouds and other networks, serving local, national, and international network operators. DE-CIX Richmond is key to creating more distributed and diverse ecosystems on the East Coast, bringing connectivity solutions into the closest proximity of businesses and users.”
“This ribbon cutting symbolizes that Virginia is now the hub of a premiere interconnectivity ecosystem that embodies Dr. Cerf’s vision for fast, reliable and resilient interconnection across the globe,” added Lyn McDermid, Secretary of Administration for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
With so many great minds and ideas in one place, this summit served as the perfect melting pot of digital infrastructure expertise, experience and knowledge sharing. From a strategic planning perspective, here are the top takeaways on the industry now and where it’s going.
