What does an Internet Exchange do?
A route that sends you across to another city and back again to visit your neighbour is not the quickest nor most efficient way to get there. When this happens in traffic routing, it’s referred to as ‘tromboning’ or ‘hairpinning’. For Internet traffic – it may not just be another city - it may even be another country - this causes delays, and no one likes delays; delays cause financial losses, bad quality connections, and may harm reputations.
Historically, all networks functioned like this in hub - and -spoke architecture. IXs remove this excessively long journey by exchanging traffic closer to the users (“peering”) which keeps traffic local and removes delay!