Packet Clearing House

Packet Clearing House or PCH is a non-profit research institute formed in 1994. It supports operations and analysis in the areas of Internet traffic exchange, routing economics, and global network development.

Packet Clearing House was originally 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. It has since 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 accessibility of the Internet.

As of 2013^[update], major PCH projects include the construction and support of more than a third of the world's approximately 350 Internet exchange points (IXPs); operation of the INOC-DBA global Internet infrastructure protection hotline communications system; support for globally anycast Domain Name System (DNS) resources including root nameservers and more than one hundred and thirty top-level domains (TLDs); operation of the only FIPS 140-2 Level 4 global TLD DNSSEC key management and signing infrastructure, with facilities in Singapore, Zurich, and San Jose; implementation of network research data collection initiatives in more than three dozen countries; and the development and presentation of educational materials to foster a better understanding of Internet architectural principles and their policy implications among policy makers, technologists, and the general public. Among PCH's more than 500 institutional donors are the Soros Open Society Institute, which funded PCH in the development of open-source software tools which assist Internet service providers (ISPs) in optimizing the routing of their traffic, reducing the cost and increasing the performance of Internet service as delivered to the public; the United Nations Development Programme, Cisco Systems, NTT/Verio, Level 3, Equinix, the governments of Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Mexico, France, Singapore, Chile, Switzerland, and the United States, and hundreds of Internet service providers and individuals.

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