South Africa’s internet exchange points are playing a key role in the efficiency and stability of the internet across Africa, according to Ispa’s INX-ZA.

South African internet exchange points (IXPs) are playing a key role in improving the efficiency and reliability of global internet services at a regional and intracontinental level, according to INX-ZA.

They do this by reducing latency for services that are cached locally, like streaming content, and serving as alternative routing pathways when disruptions in undersea cable infrastructure occur, according to Nishal Goburdhan, manager of INX-ZA, an autonomous division of the Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa).

INX-ZA runs various internet exchange points across South Africa, including Jinx in Johannesburg and Cinx in Cape Town. The other big local IXP, NAPAfrica, is owned and operated by data centre company Teraco.

“South African internet exchanges are no longer just serving local ISPs; we have become internet exchanges for the region,” Goburdhan told TechCentral in an interview.

“There’s traffic that’s coming from Namibia to Botswana that’s going through South Africa. Traffic that goes from Ghana on the west coast to Tanzania on the east coast now goes through South Africa, too.”

Benefits for internet service providers in the rest of Africa include reduced latency and decreased cost when compared to routing via Europe, which is often further in distance than South Africa.

Downstream effects

Paying South African ISPs to carry traffic in rand is also cheaper than paying their European counterparts for the same service in euros. According to Goburdhan, the retention of this money within the continent has downstream effects such as cheaper internet and improved internet infrastructure, while the capital inflows to South Africa boost local job creation.

But it’s the redundancy effects that local exchanges are having on consumers elsewhere on the continent that are proving most valuable.

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“This is fantastic, because if you think about what happened when we had all those submarines cables go down and everybody was panicking, people [elsewhere on the continent] peering in South African internet exchanges were not seeing any of that,” said Goburdhan, who cited an example INX-ZA customers in Ghana who reported that all their services were unaffected by the submarine cable outages in March off Ivory Coast.

Before INX-ZA built South Africa’s first internet exchange beneath Jan Smuts Ave in Rosebank in 1996, local ISPs would connect to each other’s networks through international routes. So, for example, an e-mail sent by a customer of ISP A in Johannesburg would be routed to servers in Europe so that an international ISP like British Telecom could reroute the email to ISP B back in South Africa. This led to a lot of capital unnecessarily flowing out of the country.

IXPs are similar to interchanges on highways, which allow vehicles – the data packets in this instance – to connect to a variety of different routes, providing more direct means to get from one place to another.

Today INX-ZA has four active internet exchange points across South Africa in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Nelson Mandela Bay. The organisation is data centre-agnostic in its approach (by contrast, INX-ZA competitor NAPAfrica is only available at Teraco’s data centres).

Goburdhan said he does not foresee another internet exchange entering the local market as South Africa is too small to accommodate it.

Regarding growth in the rest of Africa, INX-ZA is working with exchanges in places like Ghana and to help these regions develop their own IXPs.