TIX

TIX is the abbreviation for Tanzania Internet Exchange. A project of the Tanzania Internet Service Providers Association or TISPA, the TIX is an Internet exchange point in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. It was established in the year 2003 and is based at Posta Building, Ghana Avenue in Dar es Salaam. As of October 2007, as many as 14 companies were a part of the Tanzania Internet Exchange.

Mission

The main motive of TIX is to provide a local facility to the exchange of Internet traffic, which it thinks is best done by an industry association or an independent body. The TIX encourages the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Tanzania to connect their networks with one another so that they can transfer traffic more directly and will also help in offering new and efficient routing possibilities. This in turn, helps in surfing of the websites easier and also provides new opportunities for local businesses. Finally, this will also help the businesses to save lot of money which would have otherwise gone for the payment of international satellite links.

Apart from this, the TIX also aims at reducing the cost of bandwidth for local traffic for ISP as well as for the end-users. It also wishes to enhance the convenience for accessing the local content by the end-users. It plans to create a networking hub with the help of which the Tanzanian society can seek information regarding the intensive services.

The future plans of TIX

The TIX is looking forward to include more peering parties and is wishing to provide greater volume of transit peering traffic. The TIX wishes to connect to upcountry peers, as well as to the Regional Internet Exchanges. It is also planning to do site mirroring of the sites which are heavily visited.