Several industry players have joined forces to offer carrier-neutral wholesale broadband to Internet service providers (ISPs), through a new company called IPINX.
It was formed to speed up access to Seacom, price cuts on SAT-3/SAFE, and Dark Fibre Africa's national fibre network. IPINX says the benefits of these developments have been slow to filter down to ISPs, business and consumers.
IPINX says it will pass the benefits of more affordable local and international broadband to subscribers through ISPs.
CEO Marius Oberholzer says the company will “provide carrier-neutral access connectivity to operators and companies that have been unable to leverage scale to their benefit”.
He adds: “Our business model is designed to deliver core services to ISPs and corporates, but at the same time leave them to be innovative and create their own custom solutions. Furthermore, we plan to operate on a simple cost-recovery plus fair margin basis and to treat everyone the same.”
Range of services
IPINX will offer service providers and companies access to a range of broadband access mediums on a wholesale basis, including scalable Telkom IPC/ADSL, iBurst, and Metro-Ethernet. In addition, IPINX offers international transit via Seacom SDH connectivity to Leve3 in the UK and alternatively SAT-3/SAFE.
Oberholzer says: “By leveraging lower Seacom pricing and delivering it at sub-STM1 levels to providers, everyone can finally afford Seacom bandwidth.”
In addition to the wholesale services, IPINX will offer a free, independent Internet exchange point to encourage settlement-free peering between providers. “Peering is not rocket science, and the exchange of Internet traffic between providers should not be either,” comments Oberholzer.
Connectivity to JINX and Neotel's data centre is also available, and Oberholzer points out that the core network is fully N+1 redundant with regards to power, connectivity and equipment. Two separate municipal power feeds, and triple UPS and generator-backed power feeds are available.
The IPINX network went live in December, and the first anchor tenant is already utilising its IPConnect access for its ADSL user base and transmits its traffic via Seacom international bandwidth, while using SAT-3/SAFE as a redundant failover. The second anchor tenant - a major broadband provider - is currently testing IPINX-enabled ADSL services.
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