Packet Clearing House (PCH) was formed in 1994 by Chris Alan and Mark Kent to provide efficient regional and local network interconnection alternatives for the West Coast of the United States.[9] It has grown to become a leading proponent of neutral independent network interconnection and provider of route-servers at major exchange points worldwide.
PCH provides equipment, training, data, and operational support to organizations and individual researchers seeking to improve the quality, robustness, and Internet accessibility.
Building and supporting nearly half of the world's approximately 700 Internet exchange points (IXPs), and maintaining the canonical index of Internet exchange points, with data going back to 1994;[10]
Operating the world's largest anycast Domain Name System (DNS) server platform, including two root nameservers, more than 400 top-level domains (TLDs) including the country-code domains of more than 130 countries, and the Quad9 recursive resolver;[11]
Implementing network research data collection initiatives in more than 100 countries;
Publishing original research and policy guidance in the areas of telecommunications regulation, including the 2011[13] and 2016[14]Interconnection Surveys, country reports such as those for Canada in 2012[15] and 2016[16] and Paraguay in 2012,[17] and a survey of critical infrastructure experts for the GCSC;[18] and
Developing and presenting educational materials to foster a better understanding of Internet architectural principles and their policy implications among policymakers, technologists, and the general public.
Notable past projects include the INOC-DBA critical infrastructure protection hotline communications system, now operated by the Brazilian CERT.
PCH works closely with the United States Telecommunications Training Institute (USTTI) to offer courses on telecommunications regulation, Internet infrastructure construction and management, domain name system management, and Internet security coordination, three times a year in Washington, D.C. It also teaches in 80 to 100 on-location workshops a year throughout the world.[20]
^Alan, Christopher (22 September 1994). "New multi-lateral peering group". A group of Internet service providers have proposed the creation of a new multi-lateral, no-settlement IP peering organization. The working name for the group is Packet Clearing House (PCH). The meeting will be moderated by Christopher Alan, president of ElectriCiti Incorporated, and Mark Kent, Ph.D., Director of network operations of Internet Main Street.
^"Packet Clearing House". PeeringDB. Retrieved 8 July 2021. AS 3856 handles research traffic for a global network of BGP and DNS looking glasses, and a variety of networking research projects hosted on behalf of academic and industry research labs. AS 42 handles production DNS traffic for several root servers, about 400 TLDs including 130 ccTLDs, and the Quad9 recursive resolver.
^"ICT Toolsets Announces Winners of 2003 Grant Competition". Open Society Institute. 23 August 2004. Archived from the original on 2008-06-12. Retrieved 8 July 2021. OSI is supporting Packet Clearing House in the development of open-source software tools which assist Internet service providers in optimizing the routing of their traffic, reducing the cost and increasing the performance of Internet service as delivered to the public. The 'PeerMaster' toolset functions as a matchmaking service for ISPs, allowing the individuals within each ISP who are responsible for negotiating network interconnections to find each other quickly and easily, and facilitating the interconnection transaction. The NetFlow analysis portion of the toolset goes one step further, analyzing ISPs' traffic flow and prioritizing the other ISPs, other countries, and other regions with which the ISP has the greatest degree of mutual traffic, allowing them to make better-informed network interconnection choices.
