New LINX Regional Interconnection Hub in East Africa
LINX is forming a strategic relationship with Nairobi-based hyperscale data centre provider, IXAfrica. The arrangement will see LINX establish a new interconnection facility in Nairobi, Kenya, its first physical footprint on the African continent.
IXAfrica is the largest and most technologically advanced digital location for cloud, colocation, and connectivity in East Africa. The partnership agreement is seen as hugely positive, greatly benefitting the wider networking community, and advancing the local connectivity ecosystem.
Guy Willner, Chair and Co-Founder of IXAfrica says: “We are excited to team up with LINX to build the new interconnection hub in East Africa. LINX’s excellent reputation and longstanding experience will bring enormous value to Africa and help boost interconnection for the entire region. This brings our customers, and those in other data centres in the region, access to almost 1,000 networks worldwide and really puts Nairobi on the map for global connectivity.”
Frost & Sullivan’s Digital Market Overview for Kenya predicts considerable growth for the telecommunications sector locally. It expects the digital services market to nearly double in 2022 alone, with Fintech and cloud compute services becoming increasingly important. Kenya is uniquely positioned to serve all of East Africa with fast-growing fibre connectivity throughout the whole region, with a well-connected submarine cable network with pathways to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
LINX and IXAfrica are continuing to work closely together to plan the next steps in the project. Further announcements will be made shortly.
IX-API is an open-source interface for provisioning interconnection services from different suppliers at multiple IXPs. It was designed and developed in 2019 by LINX, together with fellow exchanges, AMS-IX and DE-CIX.
Version 2 of IX-API offers members and partners additional flexibility to manage their own account, including contacts or sub-customer contacts. In addition, they will have the ability to order peering services and other interconnection services on their existing LINX ports. These include point-to-point private VLANs, and multi-point closed user groups.
LINX’s software team are also working towards enabling orders for new services such as the LINX Cloud Connect solution over the API.
Networks can view and adopt the LINX version 2 of IX-API here.
To enable the ongoing growth of the LINX LON1 peering LAN, the assigned IPv4 network has changed from 195.66.224.0/22 to 195.66.224.0/21.
Members on LINX LON1 were required to reconfigure their peering LAN interface to reflect this change. All current IPv4 addresses remain unchanged but the netmask needed changing to 255.255.248.0, mask-length /21. There were no changes to the IPv6 addressing.
If anyone has any questions please refer to the FAQs section in our technical blog.
It’s certainly been a busy few weeks for industry events. As June’s newsletter was went live members of the LINX team had only just returned from NANOG85 in Canada, the 36th Euro-IX forum in Finland, and the SReXperts – Nokia conference in Spain.
If you were unable to attend the LINX116 member meeting in May you can watch presentations again on the LINX YouTube Channel.
LINX Round Up
LINX News
LINX 2022 Board Election Result
An election for two seats on the LINX Board was held on Friday 27th May at the 2022 LINX Annual General Meeting (AGM). This formed part of the LINX116 member conference in Manchester.
Board members Neil McRae and Peter Stevens were required to stand down following completion of their three-year terms but were eligible to stand again. Following member voting, both were re-elected for a final term of three years.
Neil McRae, BT • Peter Stevens, Mythic Beasts
FSQS Certification Renewed for Another Year
FSQS (Financial Services Qualification System) is a community of financial institutions who collaborate to agree a single standard for compliance to regulators, policies and governance controls.
The FSQS Registered Mark is valued by some of the largest purchasers in the financial sector and this indicates that LINX has gone through the process required to demonstrate its commitment and credentials to the industry. LINX initially became certified for the standard last year.
EU Proposes Controversial New Rules to Combat Child Sexual Abuse Online
The European Commission has unveiled proposals for a series of new obligations for “online service providers” – a broad category that includes app stores, hosting companies, and communications services like WhatsApp, iMessage and Facebook Messenger – intended to fight the spread of child sexual abuse material.
Under the proposed regulations, messaging services and web hosts would be required to search for, and report, child abuse material – even in the case of encrypted messaging services like iMessage and WhatsApp that cannot be scanned in such a way.
While child protection organisations have welcomed the proposals, others have strongly criticised them as an attack on privacy, and accused the commission of seeking to end encrypted communications. The proposal does not explicitly call for an end to encrypted services, but critics say that requiring companies to install in their systems any software the EU deems necessary to detect child abuse material would make robust end-to-end encryption effectively impossible.
The latest report stated that 2021 was another challenging year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, LINX continued its record of sustained growth in traffic and membership numbers, as well as notable technological network innovations.
Another important development was a new pricing strategy to offer members more flexibility for LINX interconnection services. This came into effect at the beginning of 2022.
Networking for FinTech and Enterprise – Pulling it all Together
In March LINX released three special editions of the LINXcast podcast for UK FinTech Week 2022. LINX’s Senior Peering Advisor, Halil Kama, covered a number of topics but in this final episode he spoke on issues such as resilience and security, and how peering with an Internet exchange can help FinTech and Enterprise businesses keep control of their data.
If you have any ideas for a future podcast or would like to join us to discuss a topic, why not reach out to us!