Tesh Durvasula, CEO of Africa Data Centres.

Africa Data Centres (ADC) has broadened its partnership with the London Internet Exchange (LINX) after being engaged as a full point of presence (PoP) for a new East African interconnection hub.

The company announced the news today, saying the LINX Nairobi is set to go live in the coming weeks and is the region’s first interconnected, multi-site Internet Exchange Point (IXP).

This comes a month after the two entities penned a strategic partnership agreement to hunt for opportunities across new markets in Africa, to enhance connectivity, and bring digital services.

Detailing the East African link up with LINX, ADC said: “Kenya is in a unique position to serve the entire East Africa region with its fast-growing fibre connectivity, through the well-connected submarine cable network that has pathways to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

“With this announcement, customers at the Africa Data Centre’s NBO1 facility in Nairobi will have direct access to the new LINX Nairobi peering community in Kenya via a single cross-connect and will also benefit from additional services, such as LINX’s around-the-clock, on-call support and portal access.”

In addition, ADC said: “Networks that connect to LINX Nairobi from any of the data centre locations will be able to set up peering arrangements with each other, building a strong digital ecosystem in the area and encouraging traffic to be kept local.”

Nurani Nimpuno, head of global engagement for LINX, said: "With LINX Nairobi, we are not only creating a hub for Kenya, but for all of East Africa. The rapidly growing region has a huge demand for low latency, high-speed, improved interconnectivity. LINX Nairobi will not only serve local networks, but also attract international Internet providers and hyperscalers.

“ADC has already grown an impressive portfolio of networks at its Nairobi data centre, so it makes absolute sense for LINX to work with ADC. LINX Nairobi will enable connections for all networks collocated at ADC and we welcome them into the new LINX Nairobi ecosystem."

Tesh Durvasula, CEO, ADC, said: “By adding the LINX PoP in our NBO1 facility, we are able to better support our customers with an even greater variety of interconnection options than we have today.

“We are very pleased to be working together to further enhance our ecosystem to create more interconnection and peering options to strengthen our ecosystem.

“There is a substantial amount of network traffic flowing between data centres, cloud providers, customers making use of cloud services, and ultimately, end-users.

“Having an effective interconnection strategy in place is critical for businesses across the globe as it ensures the efficient distribution of workloads throughout the entire infrastructure, fueling an integrated and resilient network.

"This PoP is just one more way in which Africa Data Centres is helping businesses across Africa connect to the rest of the world while keeping their data within their own borders.”