The companies say their collaboration will cover areas such as operations and software development as well as commercial activities and promotion.
John Souter, CEO at LINX, said. “Network operators and internet exchanges understand how important it is to work together for a greater good. By collaborating with France-IX we can help maintain and grow an effective Internet for everyone.”
Both internet exchange points (IXPs) are membership-based organisations with a shared vision: build an open community of network operators interconnecting to maintain and grow an internet for everyone, they said.
Franck Simon, president at France-IX, said: “One of our aims is also to work on helping both English-speaking and French-speaking African countries to develop IXPs, and be able to provide African networks with the ability to reach either London or Marseille.”
LINX and France-IX said they intend to share technical and commercial knowledge and expertise as well as driving the concept of regional peering and keeping traffic local.
The technical teams of the exchanges will work together and explore ways of providing a better service by producing and releasing new tools and processes. Development and customer service departments of both IXPs will also collaborate on other mutually beneficial projects.
Additionally, the management and business development teams of both IXPs will work together on the new services to be deployed to meet their memberships’ expectations.
Simon added: “Since we launched in June 2010, we have developed partnerships with other IXPs resulting in interconnections with five partner IXPs in Europe and four IXP trainings and support in Africa. However this partnership with LINX represents a first at this level of cooperation among all sorts of areas of the operations.”
