There has been a further expansion of the oldest internet exchange in Africa, the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX) following an agreement between INX-ZA and Liquid Telecom South Africa.
JINX has been operating since June 1996, enabling internet service providers to interconnect their networks thus ensuring that local internet users enjoy high speed internet access while operators enjoy lower costs with the resultant effect of boosting access to affordable internet bandwidth.
The announcement of the new partnership was made at the 2017 Africa Peering and Internet Forum (AfPIF) where Ben Roberts, Group Chief Technical Officer of Liquid Telecom said the company has been supporting Internet peering and African Internet exchanges for a long while.
“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,” Roberts said.
Speaking on the importance of Johannesburg as a major interconnection point for South Africa, Roberts said alongside Nairobi, the city of Johannesburg has become a regional centre of interconnection for Africa, and a natural home for hosting cloud data storage.
INX-ZA on the other hand said JINX now has an additional data centre node, while the Cape Town Internet Exchange (CINX) has been extended. With the partnership, JINX has now been extended to Liquid Telecom’s vendor-neutral and fully-redundant data centre in Midrand Johannesburg, while CINX has been extended to Liquid Telecom’s data centre at Diep River in Cape Town.
INX-ZA Manager, Nishal Goburdhan, said Cape Town is now the third South African city with a multi-site internet exchange, all of which are operated by INX-ZA.
“INX-ZA had earlier further expanded JINX to four data centres – including Teraco Isando, Liquid Telecom Midrand, Hetzner Samrand and the original site at 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,” Goburdhan said.
INX-ZA is an autonomous division of the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) of South Africa. It is the operator of the only community-run, public Internet exchanges in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
