The Internet Service Providers’ Association of SA (ISPA) has written to the Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies outlining its case for a continued low-touch approach to the country’s data centre and Internet Exchange (INX) sector.
ISPA believes government already did a sterling job by creating the overarching framework that has allowed the country’s data centres and INXs to flourish.
“The data centre and INX sector blooms unhindered and makes a real contribution to reducing the cost to communicate in South Africa,” says Dominic Cull, regulatory adviser aas ISPA.
Now taken for granted, he says South Africa’s highly competitive and world-class data centre industry has underpinned open access models, kept traffic local and enabled local networks to convey the huge amount of video and other rich content media consumed by South Africans, particularly during the pandemic.
ISPA members are critical players in enabling the use of cloud services and primary users of the services of data centres and INXs. They have been investing in INXs for the better part of two decades and continue to do so as economies globally look to the web and the Fourth Industrial Revolution to power growth.
INX-ZA operates South Africa’s only community-run Internet exchanges in Cape Town (CINX), Johannesburg (JINX), and Durban (DINX) after JINX began as an ISPA initiative.
“Today, while the CPI advances at an unfortunate pace making many of us poorer month-after-month, the country’s INXs are a model of low-cost excellence that pass locally-routed savings onto consumers while never experiencing a moment of downtime,” according to an ISP statement.
“ISPA strongly supports the clear emphasis in the draft policy on open data, open access, data sharing and interoperability.”