Nov. 8, 2022

NEW YORK, NY. - November 8, 2022  – The Open-IX Association (OIX), a 501(c)(6) non-profit industry association and Accredited Standards Developer (ASD) of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) expands its reach to Africa, certifying  three of the largest African based Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) have obtained OIX-1 certification - the Association’s global Internet Exchange certification program.

As a result of the peer-review process, INX-ZA, a division of the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA), which operates community-run Internet exchange points in Johannesburg (JINX), Cape Town (CINX) and Durban (DINX) are the first three IX’s in Africa to become OIX-1 certified.

OIX is the leader in interconnection infrastructure standards, with three ANSI standards covering IXPs, metro edge data centers and data centers. The OIX certification represents quality engineering and transparency in operations. The OIX Community Supported IX Program allows an opportunity for growing community supported IXs to offer transparency in their service delivery.  Ultimately, OIX believes this enables large cloud and content networks to rely on emerging IXP’s infrastructure and improves internet performance and resiliency.  

These INX-ZA IXPs have all become certified through the OIX Community Supported IX Program. This program allows smaller internet exchanges, at no cost, to design and engineer their infrastructure and service platforms to be OIX-1 compliant, and to become part of OIX’s growing list of certified entities. JINX is the oldest Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Africa, and amongst the oldest 25 IXPs still operational today, globally. 

"We pride ourselves on being a 100% community driven entity, and through our bottom-up governance, on representing the will of the community. As our industry grows, standards take on an even more important role. The opportunity for our IXPs to become OIX certified is something we value greatly,” said Donald Jolley of INX-ZA. “There is considerable activity happening in Africa, on the IX and peering front. As the oldest IXP in Africa and one of the oldest in the world, JINX is a prime example that openness, community and transparency matter, and that you do not have to be an IXP owned by a data center to be successful.”

Building on the original JINX, founded by ISPA, INX-ZA now operates multisite exchanges in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. These exchanges provide a neutral facility for ISPs and operators of IP networks to connect and exchange traffic in South Africa and encourage the routing of domestic Internet traffic by providing an optimal path for traffic to reach other networks within the same city, country or continent. This reduces the usage of expensive long-distance links and improves network performance. 

“We are extremely excited to welcome the three INX-ZA operated IXPs to the OIX-certified entity ecosystem” said Eli D. Scher, Chairman of OIX. “The mission of OIX is to expand fair access to interconnection services. We strongly believe that this benefits all constituents of the internet community, and OIX is seeing broad adoption of the OIX-1 IXP technical standards in North America, Asia and across the globe. The addition of these IXPs in Africa is a great testament to the increasing importance of reliable, open and transparent standards to ensure the reliability, resiliency and performance of critical internet services.”

For a detailed list of requirements for this free program visit https://www.open-ix.org/en/certification/ixp-oix-1/ or download IXP Technical Requirements OIX-1 Non Profit (1).pdf.

If you are interested in certifying your exchange or know someone who may be interested please contact us at [email protected] today!

Sponsorship opportunities are available for OIX. More details can be found at: https://www.open-ix.org/en/sponsorship/ or contact [email protected].

Details relating to OIX-1 technical requirements for IXPs can be found at: https://www.open-ix.org/en/certification/ixp-oix-1/.

Details relating to OIX-2 technical requirements for data centers can be found at: https://www.open-ix.org/en/certification/dc-oix-2/.

Details relating to OIX-3 technical requirements for edge data centers can be found at: https://www.open-ix.org/en/certification/oix-3-edge/.

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About Open-IX:

The Open-IX Association (OIX) (www.open-ix.org) is an internet community effort to improve the landscape of internet peering and interconnection. OIX encourages the development of neutral and distributed internet exchanges, while promoting uniform standards of performance for interconnections backed by the internet community. In 2018, Open-IX became an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Accredited Association, joining nearly 250 ANSI-Accredited Standards Developers engaged in the creation and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards. The Association aims to promote common and uniform specifications for data transfer and physical connectivity, and improve overall internet performance by developing criteria and methods of measurement to reduce the complexity that restricts interconnection in fragmented markets.