INX-ZA has extended the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX) and the Cape Town Internet Exchange (CINX).
The group made the announcement at the 2017 Africa Peering and Internet Forum (AfPIF), currently taking place in Abidjan, C^ote D'Ivoire.
It said JINX has added a fourth data centre node and 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 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 expansion announcements follow an agreement between INX-ZA and Liquid Telecom South Africa. The partnership has seen INX-ZA extend the reach of JINX to Liquid Telecom's 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 SA with a multi-site Internet exchange, all of which are operated by INX-ZA," said INX-ZA manager Nishal Goburdhan.
"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 SA as the primary centre for cloud and interconnection."
Liquid Telecom's data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town are undergoing major upgrades and are home to the fibre routes of many major carriers, mobile network operators, cloud service providers and financial institutions. The data centres were acquired by Liquid Telecom earlier in 2017 and are being expanded to meet the needs of global cloud players.
"Johannesburg is not only a major interconnection point for SA, but, alongside Nairobi in Kenya, has emerged as a regional centre of interconnection for Africa, and a natural home for hosting cloud data storage," said Liquid Telecom group CTIO Ben Roberts, speaking at the AfPIF conference.
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.
Internet exchanges in SA 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 make it easy for Internet companies which already have infrastructure at existing INX locations to connect seamlessly to networks at new locations.
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