History of the Tanzania Internet eXchange -- TIX

TIX is a project of TISPA. TISPA was registered as a non-profit organisation in December 2002. Main motivation was to get an organisation to support the creation of a local Internet Exchange Point. This is only a short term goal and TISPA functions are not limited to that.

September 05, 2003
sending request for /24 to Bill Manning
September 09, 2003
got answer from Bill Manning and we can use 198.32.179.0/24 for TIX
September 10, 2003
sent req for ASNs to Bill "Woody" Woodcock
September 13&14, 2003
meeting to agree on setup and implementation (Sendoro&Frank)
September 2?, 2003
TCC meeting
September 26, 2003
TCC letter instructing all ISPs to connect to TIX
October 13, 2003
Afol & Raha did router work, stats server delivered&install started
October 14, 2003
sent email requesting ASN to ARIN
October 17, 2003
1st successful BGP session between RR and AfOL border router. At same time also with raha.com border router
October 27, 2003
outage for one minute
October 28, 2003
outage for 3 hours (11 - 14 hrs EAT) for electrical installations.
same time
started to produce beautiful statistics at http://stats.tix.or.tz/ and http://stats.tix.or.tz/detail.html . Updated every 5 minutes. Traffic statistics also backed up daily.
same time
visits to TIX get boring since TIX is working perfectly, but noone exchanging traffic.
October 29, 2003
updated website to conform to XHTML 1.1. Logo&links on main page only.
November 6, 2003
19:26 hrs raha.com was peering with TIX. Noone else to exchange traffic with.
November 7, 2003
Africa Online was peering with TIX.
November 19, 2003
Africa Online advertising all and ready for traffic. Some traffic around noon.
Later: Since raha.com down, noone else to exchange traffic with.
December 8 or earlier, 2003
raha.com peers BGP, but does not (yet) advertise routes. That means: traffic raha.com -> Africa Online working
January 9, 2004
CATS-Net connected, working --> 4 traffic flows working
January 12, 2004
added status text to http://stats.tix.or.tz/. Also archiving of routing info.
January 13, 2004
new and extremely beautiful version of http://www.tix.or.tz/how2connect.html
January 13, 2004
SimbaNet is peering with a test-phase
January 13, 2004
evening: raha.com fully peering: 4 ISPs fully peering = 12 traffic flows (6 duplex)
January 17, 2004
all ok & working. All peers satisfied with results.
January 20, 2004
testing routing updates if link drops. Test successful (though unplanned).
March 23, 2004
BoT connected.
June 4, 2004
SatCoNet connected (100Mbps).
June 5, 2004
COSTECH connected
June 11, 2004
Africa Online connects first _real_ AS - 31810
June 19, 2004
UCC connected
July 6, 2004
over 1 Mbps transferred !
November 2, 2004
Meeting with most ISPs to (re-) found TISPA the association
end November 2004
we had a bad week - power outages at Posta house
February 15, 2005
Benson Online joins TIX!
March 3, 2005
we had 2.4Mbps transferred - first time over 2Mbps!
April 5, 2005
AfSat have connected to TIX! Congratulations. They are the 9th peer joining up!
April 29, 2005
The University Computing Centre enabled their link (again) and is the 10th peer at TIX! Welcome!
June 1, 2005
Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology has connected as 11th peer to TIX.
June 22, 2005
Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited has connected as 12th peer to TIX.
August 2, 2005
We received AS 33791 from AfriNIC we will soon change over peering to the new AS.
September 5, 2005
We configured AS33791 and peered with Africa Online and others
September 15, 2005
Most ISPs using eBGP now and official ASNs - very beautiful.
Also: first time over 1Mbps as 2-hour average!
September 16, 2005
the average transfer for the whole day of September 15th (24h) was >500kbps (5.5GByte transferred) !
Traffic for September 15, 2005.
April 2, 2007
Official TIX launch.
June 11, 2007
received our IPv4 PI assignment 196.223.5.0/24 from AfriNIC
July 6, 2007
applied for IPv6 addresses at AfriNIC
July 11, 2007
We received our IPv6 /48 assignment 2001:43f8::/48 from AfriNIC
September 17, 2007
Vodacom joined TIX
October 22, 2007
Zanlink joined TIX
October 23, 2007
Statistics server reachable on IPv6 as http://stats.ipv6.tix.or.tz/ (Thanks, Rikunj)
November 7, 2007
Celtel joined TIX
June 25, 2008
TRA joined TIX
October 24, 2008
WIA joined TIX
November 11, 2008
TISCAN joined TIX
December 20, 2008
Switch-over to the new switch donated by NSRC.
March 20, 2009
The aggregate traffic over TIX was greater than 20GB.
March 27, 2009
ALINK connected to TIX.
May 29, 2009
tzNIC connected to TIX.
June 9, 2009
average 24-h traffic was over 2 Mbps, but not for the first time.
July 9, 2009
Two new peers in one day! Both Vizada and Zantel have started peering.
July 30, 2009
average traffic of more than 2.5Mbps in last 24hours! Which means: more than 27GB transferred in this time.
August 20, 2009
our instance of the K-Root DNS server was activated, reducing latency to this DNS root server for all TIX peers.
February 1, 2010
Tigo connected to TIX.
June 1, 2010
SimbaNet enabled IPv6 on TIX.
November 1, 2010
UhuruOne connected to TIX.
February 24, 2011
Aptus Solutions connected to TIX.
February 8, 2012
Six Telecoms Company Limited (AS37149) connected to TIX.
June 13, 2012
TRA now connected with IPv6: *> 2001:43F8:610::/48
October 24, 2012
67Mbps traffic spike across TIX.
May 9, 2013
Bell Communications Ltd (AS37126) connected to TIX and immediately had over 6Mbps traffic!.
August 15, 2013
Tanzania Ports Authority (TPA) (AS37362) connected to TIX.
August 7, 2014
Smart (AS33772) connected to TIX.
January 20, 2015
e-Government Agency (eGA) (AS 327795) connected.
April 7, 2015
Verisign RIRS (AS 26415) connected, providing a DNS root server (J.root-servers.net) and a GTLD DNS server for .com and .net zones (B.gtld-servers.net).
April 18, 2015
SEACOM (AS 37100) connected, providing a local GGC to TIX peers.
June 8, 2015
PCH (AS 42 & AS 3856) connected, providing "E" DNS Root server and DNS for several TLDs.
September 15, 2015
Liquid Telecom (AS 30844) connected, first international network to do so.
December 18, 2015
Akamai (AS 20940) connected.
March 10, 2016
CTV (AS 327728) connected.
April 11, 2016
Smile Communications (AS327692) connected.
August 16, 2016
Atemi Data Networks (AS 37423) connected.
August 18, 2016
CMC Networks (AS 25818) connected.
August 30, 2016
Halotel (AS 327885) connected. First Tanzanian peer (non-CDN) connected with 10G!
January 25, 2017
SIMPLYCONNECT (AS 327900) connected.
August 20, 2017
Capital Technologies (AS 327859) connected.
October 10, 2017
SEACOM (AS 37100) connected. Not just a GGC, whole AS37100 network.
October 31, 2017
AfriNIC DNS services (AS 37177 and AS 37181) connected.
May 2, 2018
TERNET (AS37182) connected to TIX.
October 24, 2018
Implemented Large BGP Communities (RFC8092) at the TIX route servers.
February 8, 2019
Reached a new record of 20Gbps. And then a utility power outage affected consumers :-( .
June 15, 2019
created ROA for TIX management IP blocks.
July 18, 2019
created ROAs for all of TISPA's IXP peering LAN IP blocks. With AS 0.
July 18, 2019
Net Solutions (AS328514) connected to TIX. Same day they got ASN and IP!
September 9, 2019
TISPA submitted a position paper to the Ministry for Works, Transport and Communication as input for the SADC Ministers' meeting.
February 13, 2020
passed 10Gbps of traffic.
February 24, 2020
Finally the last peer (BoT) stopped using as private ASN and changed to their public one (AS327778).
May 17, 2021
AS31810 re-connects as EchoTel.
September 14, 2021
AS63293 - Facebook connects to TIX.
September 17, 2021
AS328895 - Wincable connects to TIX.
February 3, 2022
Akamai enabled a new cluster.
September 12, 2022
Dimension Data (AS3741) connected to TIX.
July 11, 2023
Cybernet - Arusha Art Ltd - AS37143 connected to TIX.
March 26, 2024
upgraded Akamai TIX connection to 10x 10Gbps
April 5, 2024
TIX has over 90 Gbps of traffic, of which more than half is from Akamai

for more info, please contact us at info@tix.or.tz.

TISPA
PO Box 80449
Dar es Salaam
Tanzania

WWW: http://tix.or.tz/
Email: info@tix.or.tz