Durban has become the first city in South Africa to get a multi-site Internet exchange point.
Internet exchange points allow service providers to interconnect their networks so that users benefit from faster connections and more efficient access to online services.
Internet exchanges in South Africa have historically been limited to a single location, requiring Internet service providers using the exchange to have infrastructure connecting to that location.
INX-ZA, which operates a number of Internet exchanges around the country, has now extended the Durban Internet Exchange (DINX) to a second location, in Umhlanga.
Having multiple-site Internet exchanges lowers the operating costs for local service providers based in Durban and increases the quality of the experience for users in the city, especially when accessing websites hosted locally in Durban, INX-ZA said in a statement.
The second exchange point is the result of a public-private partnership agreement between INX-ZA and Durban’s Ethekwini municipality, which has contributed resources from its metropolitan fibre project.
“The extension of DINX makes it easy for Internet companies who already have infrastructure in Umhlanga to connect to peers at the existing DINX location,” explained INX-ZA manager Nishal Goburdhan.
“Peers at the new site will have the same peering experience and will be able to be directly linked, at no additional complexity to all existing, and future DINX peers,” he said.
“Network operators now get more flexibility in the choice of location that they may want to host their infrastructure at.
“Companies connecting to DINX also get immediate access to resilient core Internet infrastructure services, like the domain name services hosted at the current DINX location, which means that users on their networks are less likely to experience downtime if the global domain name system comes under attack.”
The Umhlanga extension to DINX is hosted in a facility owned by Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions.
INX-ZA began as a project of the Internet Service Providers’ Association, but is now independently managed by the users of the Internet exchanges.
It has community-run, public Internet exchanges in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
Its Johannesburg exchange point is the oldest Internet exchange in Africa, having been established in December 1996. Plans are underway to extend multisite capabilities to both Johannesburg and Cape Town. – © 2016 NewsCentral Media
