LINX expands interconnection at PAIX Nairobi

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) has announced its expansion of the African interconnection platform to PAIX Data Centres in Nairobi due to increasing demand from the local networking community

LINX Nairobi, a neutral, multi-location interconnection service, offers peering options for networks aiming to boost performance, improve redundancy, and reduce latency. Since its launch in November 2023, this Internet Exchange Point (IXP) has rapidly grown, attracting a strong community of local ISPs, global content providers, and key partners, with increasing traffic levels.

After extensive engagement with the local engineering community and rising interest from networks based at PAIX, LINX decided to scale its infrastructure, just nine months post-launch.

Located in Upper Hill’s Britam Tower, PAIX Nairobi NBO-1 sits in a key business and financial district for East and Central Africa. Networks housed in this facility will soon be just one cross-connection away from peering with those on the LINX Nairobi platform, connecting global giants like Meta and local ISPs such as ICON Fiber, Mtaani Telecom, Mymanga Networks, and PepeaNet.

Kenya's digital growth

LINX Nairobi's infrastructure is supported by dual fibre connections between its data centre locations, ensuring full resilience and redundancy. Adding PAIX will elevate LINX’s network to a 4-site interconnection hub, with installation work underway and expected to go live shortly.

PAIX Data Centres’ sales manager Emmanuel Makina, stated, “With our cloud- and carrier-neutral datacentre located in the centre of the business district, we host communities of interest for the financial and content industries, so that includes financial services, advertising, broadcasting, and entertainment companies. The customers that host their mission critical equipment in our facility have a requirement to be online 24×7 in today’s digital economy. They all benefit from being able to connect to multiple networks, easily scale their bandwidth, reduce their connectivity costs, and have the lowest latency to their partners.”

“Further, the PAIX facility is a natural communications hub for Nairobi: in a very central location in Upper Hill, and next to Britam Tower where our customers can colocate their antennas for wireless connectivity to all parts of the city,” added Makina.

Jennifer Holmes, chief commercial officer for LINX, commented, “We didn’t expect to be expanding the LINX Nairobi network this soon, but we like to pride ourselves in our commitment to the local community. They said, we listened. By expanding the peering opportunities to the customers at PAIX we are adding value to the entire LINX Nairobi community and prospective new local and global networks who we are in talks with.”

PAIX Data Centres CEO and founder, Wouter van Hulten, emphasised their dedication to advancing Kenya’s digital infrastructure, “PAIX Data Centres is fully committed to the development of Kenya’s digital infrastructure, with support for all the latest AI hardware and software. PAIX Data Centres is invested in by Africa50, a private equity fund in which the Republic of Kenya is a shareholder. We are building and operating the infrastructure to enable Africa’s digital economy, with local datacentres, local teams, and world class operations, all essential ingredients for the developments that lie ahead. We warmly welcome LINX to the PAIX Community in Kenya.”

The teams from PAIX and LINX are available at ITW Africa in Nairobi this week to discuss network deployment strategies, peering opportunities, and much more regarding LINX Nairobi.