The Cairo Regional Internet Exchange (CRIX) is an Internet Exchange Point which was formed in Cairo, Egypt by a joint venture between the National Telecom Company (NTC) and its subsidiary ECC Solutions along with the Indian FLAG Telecom.
[1] The exchange was officially inaugurated in Cairo on December 18, 2002 by the then Minister of Communications & Information Technology, later Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif.
[2] CRIX is the central peering point for local and regional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Egypt and the Middle East.
Its purpose is to efficiently route all intra-Regional Internet traffic among the operators without having to pass through the United States or Europe.
[3] This allows the regional data carriers to significantly optimize upstream capacity costs, enhance their existing bandwidth capacities and reduce the size of the routing tables worldwide.