Foundation

Discussions and several initiatives regarding the set-up of an Internet exchange for the Caribbean region, e-commerce and e-zone date back to the early millenium years. Due to the lack of a neutral party acting as a catalyst regarding the set-up it took time before the project began to shape up. Based on the previous initiatives, the present involvement of the succesful Amsterdam Internet Exchange, the financial backing of the Bureau Telecommunication and Post of the Netherlands Antilles and the firm support of the current minister, the project took off late 2007.  The CAR-IX Association (and corporation) were  founded by the following companies in June 2008:

 

 

Official Founding meeting of CAR-IX

Founding Members

  • UTS
  • Scarlet
  • Telbo
  • Digicel
  • EOCG Wireless

The exchange was officially opened on March 23rd 2009 by the Minister of Transport and Communications of The Netherlands Antilles - ir. M.H.P.P. Adriaens.

In the picture the official founding meeting of CAR-IX - left to right the founding members (excl. Telbo), the minister, dir. BT & P, Jan van Rees, Nico Scheper and the notary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The exchange governance structure and technical design are both modeled after the Amsterdam Internet Exchange. The network operations is run by the AMS-IX engineering team.

Governance Structure

The official legal entities of the CAR-IX are the Caribbean Internet Exchange Association and the limited corporation Caribbean Internet Exchange B.V. Both are commonly referred to by the acronym CAR-IX.

Both legal entities are obliged to have two formal meetings per year of their stakeholders, namely the General Assembly Meeting of the Association and the Shareholders Meeting of the Corporation. To keep things straightforward CAR-IX combines those meetings into one. The same principle applies to the Executive Board of the Association and the Supervisory Board of the Corporation. They consist of the same elected officials and are simply called the Board. The management of the Corporation reports to the Supervisory Board on a quarterly basis. The Supervisory Board reports to the assembly/shareholders twice a year in the General Meeting, also called GM for short.

The Supervisory Board holds 5 seats and the officials are elected from representatives from the member organizations.  There is a rolling election scheme. The terms in seat are 3 years with one option for re-election.  The current board has been formed from the original founding members and consists of the following people: 

  • Eric Stakland, Chairman (Scarlet)
  • Lyrio Gomez (UTS)
  • Nelson Pereira (Digicel)
  • Edsel Winklaar (Telbo)
  • Chris Engels (EOCG Wireless)

The corporation is currently run by Mr. Nico Scheper who takes care of member relations, financial administration, manages external relations with colocation, suppliers, vendors, local public and interested parties in general. The local operations can be contacted by email through info (at) car-ix dot net.

Operations

The technical operations is outsourced to the AMS-IX engineering team with additional local remote smart hands. This team consists  of 9 highly skilled engineers who manage and monitor the exchange 24x7. Henk Steenman the AMS-IX CTO has over 20 years of (IP) network operations, management and strategy experience. For more details regarding technical details and operations please refer to Technical Details