The Tanzania Internet eXchange (TIX) is a project of the country's ISP association, the Tanzania Internet Service Provider Association (TISPA). TISPA was registered as a non-profit organisation in 2002 with the primary purpose of establishing a formal entity to support the creation and management of a local IXP. By September 2003, the facilities were ready and the national regulator, the Tanzanian Communications Commission (TCC), issued a letter instructing all ISPs to connect to TIX. The first successful BGP session between two of the ISPs took place the following month.
TIX is situated in a small room on the top floor of an office block in Dar es Salaam. To cope with the unreliable power supply in the city, TIX has one 3kVA online UPS with 15 external batteries. For reducing the ambient temperature in the city’s tropical climate, two window unit air conditioners are deployed. All electronic equipment is housed in two full-height cabinets. The central IXP equipment is in one cabinet and the routers of participating ISPs and peers are in the second cabinet.
The heart of the exchange is a HP Procurve 8000m Ethernet switch with 64 10/100Mbit ports, donated by the Network Start-up Resource Center (NSRC) (www.nsrc.org). TIX has 2 route server routers: a Cisco 2514 and a Cisco 1760. An instance of the K-Root DNS server is also hosted at TIX.
