Cape Town – Durban is the first South African city to get a multi-site internet exchange point.
Internet Exchange South Africa (INX-SA) announced on Tuesday that the coastal city’s second exchange point at Umhlanga would benefit users through faster connections.
An internet exchange allows service providers to connect directly rather than through one or more third-party networks, which helps to speed up in-country internet loading times.
“The extension of DINX [Durban internet exchange] makes it easy for internet companies who already have infrastructure in Umhlanga to connect to peers at the existing DINX location. 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,” said Nishal Goburdhan, INX-ZA manager.
Ethekwini Municipality committed resources from its Ethekwini Fibre Metro project to complete the exchange which is better able to cope with traffic load.
“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 down-time if the global domain name system comes under attack,” said Goburdhan.
INX-SA said that it is working to launch similar exchange points in both Johannesburg and Cape Town.
“We expect that in the next few months, many of these initiatives will start to mature, and network operators, present at the various INXes across the country, will start to reap the benefits," Goburdhan said.
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