LINX IXP in Jeddah completes capacity upgrades

Author: Simon Rowley

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) has completed its 100G capacity upgrade project in Jeddah, following an increase in customers and port demands at the interconnection hub in KSA.

LINX has been powering Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) for Center3, its strategic partner in Saudi Arabia, since 2018. Jeddah was the first port of call for this deployment and since then, LINX peering services have gone live in Riyadh and teams are preparing to deploy in Dammam this year.

Jeddah is one of the main landing stations for subsea cables in the Middle East, distributing global content locally and providing convenient onward connectivity to Asia, Europe and Africa.

The IXP in Jeddah creates a neutral and central meeting point in the MG1 (MENA Gateway) data centre for carriers, cloud, content providers, enterprise networks and more to peer their network traffic locally and improve end user online performance. The IXP also offers lower latency, increased control and resilience, and increased security and redundancy.

Halil Kama, Regional Director for LINX in the Middle East, comments, “We are pleased to be upgrading our internet exchange capacity with an additional 16x 100G port capability due to customer demand in Jeddah. This enhancement further strengthens Jeddah’s role as a digital gateway, ensuring faster, more efficient connections for networks and users across the region.”

With regular traffic peaks over 650Gbps, networks connected into the IXP in Jeddah need to ensure their ports have the capacity to cope with the spikes in online traffic often generated by sporting events or gaming upgrades.

There were 36.84 million internet users in Saudi Arabia in January 2024, with an impressive internet penetration rate of 99% of the total population at the start of 2024. Additionally, Kepios analysis indicates that internet users in Saudi Arabia increased by 527,000 (1.4%) between January 2023 and January 2024.

The rapid evolution of the digital scene in Saudi Arabia is fuelled by its Vision 2030 strategy. The growth in sports and event tourism has generated a greater need for lower latency streaming solutions, and with talks that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) could acquire a minority stake in sports streaming service, DAZN, this demand is set to continue to increase.

AWS has also just announced Jeddah as a new CloudFront Edge location and plans to invest more than $5.3 billion (£4.3bn) in the long term to develop Saudi Arabi as an AWS cloud region.

With an increase in partnerships, investments and services comes a further demand for capacity and continued and reliable low latency interconnection solutions.

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