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The Internet Service Providers’ Association of South Africa (ISPA) has experienced enthusiastic adoption of the Cape Town Internet Exchange (CINX) by ISPs in the Western Cape since the exchange went live a year ago.
CINX is currently handling traffic in excess of 500Mbps from 16 peers that interconnect with each other using the exchange. This is just the traffic crossing the switching fabric which means that the actual traffic exchanged is actually higher.
ISPA’s Johannesburg and Cape Town exchanges encourage the local routing of Internet traffic not destined for international locations.
CINX is hosted at Internet Solutions’ data centre in Cape Town and was built using two carrier-class switches donated by Juniper Networks and XON..
CINX was reintroduced in October 2009 to allow members to route Cape Town traffic locally rather than needing to route it through Johannesburg or through international links. CINX allows all service providers (not just ISPA members) to interconnect networks and exchange traffic in order to save costs.
Rob Hunter, Chair of the INX Working Group at ISPA, said that ISPA decided to bring back CINX to meet overwhelming demand from members with operations in Cape Town for a local exchange in the city. Since then, ISPs and Internet users in the city have generated more than enough traffic to justify the need for CINX.
Hunter added that ISPA’s new policies around equivalent line charges are one reason that there has been such interest in peering via CINX in the Cape Town region. Another lies in the fact that Cape Town’s Internet usage has shot up dramatically as online media, call centres and other heavy Internet business users have flourished.
CINX adds an extra layer of redundancy to Cape Town’s Internet infrastructure and also boosts the performance of local Internet usage in the region by creating shorter routes between ISPs. It also helps to reduce costs to the benefit of ISPs operating in the Western Cape.
Hunter noted that the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX) has also experienced dramatic growth in the past year with the amount of traffic that passes through the exchange growing more than 100% to 2Gbps. JINX currently has 27 ISPs that peer using the exchange.
