Egypt

In 2002, Egypt became the first country in the Arab region to create an IXP, CAIX, on the back of a dynamic ISP market and Egypt’s position as the hub location for a large number of international submarine cable landings. Egypt was also among the first countries in Africa to host root and top-level domain name servers at the IXP. Fostered by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), 60 local ASNs with 232 international links were hosted at CAIX by 2010. CAIX continues to be operated by the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA) and hosted by Telecom Egypt in its Ramses central office. In addition, GPX Global Systems, a private-sector data-centre operator with presence in Mumbai, provides IXP services known as MEIX.

At CAIX, there are four ISPs (TEDATA, Vodafone, Linkdotnet, Etisalat) connected via a gigabit interface and three ISPs (Noor, MenaNet, YALLA) connected via Fast Ethernet. Peak traffic currently runs at about 1.1Gbps. In addition, CAIX hosts PCH's Anycast servers that have copies of about 30 ccTLDs.

There are no fees for connecting to CAIX; however, content providers and service providers wishing to host their servers where CAIX is located pay hosting fees to Telecom Egypt. Interconnection policy requires that all traffic exchanged must be via the CAIX switch fabric, that all members must peer with CAIX router, and that all members must advertise all local IP routes they have in their routing tables to the CAIX router. A scarce resource policy is also in place where the CAIX administration team has the right to reclaim under-utilized resources if they are needed for another CAIX member that can demonstrate a need for those resources.

http://www.caix.net.eg

http://www.gpxglobal.net