Johannesburg Internet Exchange

JINX (Johannesburg Internet Exchange), located at Johannesburg, South Africa, is the main Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Africa.^[1] It is run by the Internet Service Providers' Association of South Africa (ISPA).^[2]

JINX started operating in 1996. The amount of traffic processed by the JINX has been steadily growing, and growth has been exponential in the second half of the 2000s (decade),^[2] with, for example, 450 Mbps peak-hour load in 2008^[1] that almost doubled to 800 Mbit/s in early 2010.^[3] In part the growth can be attributed to the open peering policy adopted by some of the larger participants, like TENET and MWEB and the large content base that is available from provider like Internet Solutions. When using JINX figures to extrapolate Internet usage stats in South Africa, bear in mind that a significant amount of traffic does not go through the public switch fabric, but is changed over private peering sessions.^[4]

Most major South African Internet Service Providers have chosen to peer via JINX: some examples are Internet Solutions, Neotel, TENET, iBurst, Vox Telecom and MWEB.^[2] Real time traffic statistics are available on the JINX Traffic Graphs.

In 2009, the ISPA restarted the exchange point in Cape Town, CINX, to complement JINX, and in September 2012, an exchange point in Durban, (DINX),^[5] was started.

The IP address block for JINX is 196.223.14.X/24, and 2001:43f8:1f0::/48.^[6]
In 2012, the ISPA appointed Nishal Goburdhan as the full-time manager of the Internet Exchange points in South Africa.^[7]

Governance structure of JINX

As a peering point the JINX is open to any network that is able to peer. Initially, the JINX was only available to ISPA members, but in 2008 a resolution was passed to allow non-ISPA members to connect to the JINX. As at Feb 2013, the three Internet exchange points mentioned above are all managed through the ISPA run INX-wg.^[8] Membership to the INX-wg is free, and open to any peer at the IX.

Proposals and suggestions are generated at the INX-wg level. Consensus is sought within the working group, and, the working group chair reports back to the ISPA's management committee who is responsible for either ratifying the decision, or, in the case of something requiring budgetary constraints, request more information. Although technically, a child of the ISPA, the INX-wg has relative autonomy in decision making with ISPA's management committee only rubber stamping the process.

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