INX-ZA Extends Internet Exchanges in Johannesburg and Cape Town

24 August 2017

Additional sites for Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX) and Cape Town Internet Exchange (CINX) will enhance peering in South Africa.

INX-ZA announced at the 2017 Africa Peering and Internet Forum (AfPIF) that the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX) has added a fourth data centre node and the Cape Town Internet Exchange (CINX) has been extended to become its third multi-site exchange point in Africa.

JINX began as a project of the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) and is now independently managed by INX-ZA, which currently operates the only community-run, public Internet exchanges in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.

The further expansion of Africa’s oldest Internet exchange follows an agreement between INX-ZA and Liquid Telecom South Africa, part of the leading pan-African Liquid Telecom group.

The partnership has seen INX-ZA extend the reach of JINX to Liquid Telecom’s well-positioned, vendor-neutral and fully-redundant data centre in Midrand Johannesburg and extend CINX to Liquid’s Data Centre at Diep River in Cape Town.

“Alongside Johannesburg and Durban, the recent expansion of CINX puts Cape Town on the map as the third city in South Africa with a multi-site internet exchange, all of which are operated by INX-ZA. It had earlier further expanded JINX to four data centres – including Teraco Isando, Liquid Telecom Midrand, Hetzner Samrand and the original site IS Parklands – enabling connected members in any site to peer quickly and cost effectively with members in the other data centres. This speaks to the global internet community who are seeing South Africa as the primary centre for cloud and interconnection” said Nishal Goburdhan, INX-ZA Manager.

Liquid Telecom’s data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town are currently undergoing major upgrades and are home to fibre routes of many major carriers, MNOs, cloud service providers and financial institutions. The data centres were acquired by Liquid Telecom earlier in 2017 and are undergoing major expansions to meet the needs of global cloud players.

Speaking at the AfPIF Conference, Ben Roberts, Group CTIO of Liquid Telecom said: “Liquid Telecom has been supporting Internet peering and African Internet exchanges for a long while now. We are most happy to enter into this partnership with INX-ZA for both our newly acquired carrier neutral data centres in South Africa. This means we now have three large carrier neutral data centres.”

“Johannesburg is not only a major interconnection point for South Africa, but, alongside Nairobi in Kenya, has emerged as a regional centre of interconnection for Africa, and a natural home for hosting cloud data storage,” added Roberts.

Internet exchange points enable ISPs to interconnect their networks so that domestic Internet users benefit from faster connections and more efficient access to online services. Network operators benefit from lower costs, resulting in more affordable bandwidth which is crucial for the development of the Internet.

Internet exchanges in South Africa have historically been limited to a single location requiring network operators using the exchange to invest in infrastructure connecting to that location. The extensions undertaken by INX-ZA makes it easy for Internet companies which already have infrastructure at existing INX locations to connect seamlessly to networks at new locations. Peers at the new site will have the same peering experience and will be able to be directly linked to all existing and future JINX peers, with no additional complexity.

The Johannesburg exchange point has provided continuous, uninterrupted services to users since June 1996.