Oldest Internet exchange point in South Africa that has 100% uptime

Launched in June 1996, the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX) is Africa’s longest-running exchange point, with 100% uptime over its 28-year history.

Initially housed in the same building as Internet Solutions — now NTT Data — JINX was established shortly after the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) was formed in 1995. Nine ISPs managed the facility on a volunteer basis.

An Internet Exchange Point (IXP) is physical and logical infrastructure, including routing and switching equipment, that lets organisations, network operators, content delivery networks, and cloud service providers interconnect and exchange traffic.

Interconnecting or “peering” at these exchange points helps keep local Internet traffic within local infrastructure, improving performance and avoiding unnecessary international transit costs.

Despite starting as a single switch in a cupboard outside the Internet Solutions data centre, JINX has maintained its unbroken track record.

In 2018, INX-ZA manager Nishal Goburdhan explained that they managed to avoid downtime by keeping operations simple rather than overcomplicating them.

“There are a lot of ways an INX can complicate its operation,” he said.

“For us, a crucial factor in ensuring uptime is to avoid complexity, follow best practices, and exercise caution before implementing changes — following the principle of ‘measure twice, cut once.'”

Until 2012, ISPA’s Internet exchanges were entirely volunteer-run. However, when the industry association decided the exchange points needed to become multisite, it employed someone to drive the initiative.

ISPA issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) to find a company to host the exchange in its data centre, which Internet Solutions won.

It also established an autonomous division within the organisation called INX-ZA to look after exchange points.

Although INX-ZA is no longer entirely volunteer-run, it remains driven by the community of Internet service providers in South Africa through ISPA.

Asked how they ensured that JINX never went down in the early days without a redundant switch, Goburdhan said that they used tight configuration control management, and created templates to work from.

He said if you keep everything you do simple, you drastically minimise the likelihood for mistakes to creep in.

He said it also helps that the mean time between failures for good switches — the kind that cost upwards of R150,000 — is 35 years.

Goburdhan added that there is also much to be said for the facilities in which JINX has been hosted over the years.

The exchange has moved several times, and in 2016 it expanded beyond the Internet Solutions data centre that had served it faithfully for nearly 20 years.

Nowadays, JINX is multi-homed across six data centre locations: NTT Data Parklands, Teraco Isando, Xneelo Samrand, Africa Data Centres Halfway House, Africa Data Centres Samrand, and Digital Parks Africa Samrand.

In 2024, INX-ZA announced the completion of a high-speed dark fibre network to improve JINX’s resilience and backbone capacity.

The organisation said the dark fibre rolled out between the six data centres where JINX is located provided virtually unlimited future network capacity.

INX-ZA chair Prenesh Padayachee said that successful digital transformation depended on the infinite bandwidth that dark fibre enabled.

“INX-ZA can now easily enable additional capacity between sites as more peers connect to the JINX peering fabric,” he said.

Aside from JINX, INX-ZA operates South Africa’s other community-run exchange points — the Cape Town Internet Exchange (CINX), Durban Internet Exchange (DINX), and the Nelson Mandela Bay Internet Exchange (NMBINX).