CDN77 joins JINX as networks add second African exchanges

CDN77, a global content delivery network, has joined the Johannesburg Internet Exchange, four years after it began peering at NAPAfrica in the same city. It is one of several networks that already had an African presence and have spent 2026 adding a second or third exchange rather than a first.

Member records at the exchanges show four joins since June: CDN77 and Angola Cables at JINX, and Kaopu Cloud HK and AFRICLOUD at IXPN Lagos.

Second exchanges, not first ones

The pattern is what makes this worth noting. CDN77 has peered at NAPAfrica Johannesburg since August 2022 and has now added JINX. Angola Cables has been at NAPAfrica since December 2016 and at IXPN Lagos since September 2018, and added JINX in June. Kaopu Cloud HK joined NAPAfrica in 2021, and Lagos last month.

A network peering at an exchange in a city gets local traffic from that exchange. A network peering at two gets a fallback path that stays within the country when the first fabric or a particular member’s port fails. For content networks serving South African users, the difference shows up as whether a request is served locally or hauled to Europe when something breaks.

The exchanges have been building for this

The additions land on fabrics that have spent the year adding capacity. IXPN upgraded to 400G peering at three Lagos sites in July, and NTT DATA became the first ISP in Africa to peer at 400 Gbps at JINX in April. Those ports only incur their cost if there are networks on the other side.

Peer counts give a rough sense of scale: the IPv6 route collector at JINX currently sees roughly 206 peers, and IXPN’s IPv6 route server about 90.

A note on what this is not

Route-server data alone is a poor guide to who has just joined an exchange. Telecom Italia Sparkle appeared in IXPN’s IPv6 route-server summary in July, which looks like an arrival until you check the member record: the carrier has been a full IXPN member since September 2023. What changed in July was an IPv6 session, not a membership. The joins listed above are taken from the exchanges’ own member records, not from routing data.