More JBIX peer partners reduces price of content

Johor Bahru Internet Exchange (JBIX), the second Internet Exchange in Malaysia has added more players  to peer with, to their repertoire.

 Malaysians, which Chief Peering Officer of JBIX Weng Yew Wong, observed as top consumers of social media, would be excited to know these new peering partners include the likes of Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and more.

 In 2018, 22.4 million Malaysian users were on Facebook, while Google is a popular search engine in Malaysia; ninety-eight percent of Malaysians prefer this to any other search engines out there.

 Weng who is also MD of Extreme Broadband opined that having both these web services on board JBIX would attract regional ISPs to peer with them, and enhance a connectivity ecosystem that will upgrade the Internet experience for regional audiences.

 Alternative transit point

JBIX’s strategic location at the Malaysian border next to Singapore, gives regional ISPs a choice of offloading content without crossing the boundary to Singapore and incurring more costs in the form of transit fees.

 JBIX recognizes that Singapore is an important hub for content, as many multinational companies (MNC) are headquartered on the island republic. As a result many big data centres and large concentrations of servers are based there. The whole island is served by 4 Internet exchanges.

 When Internet traffic travels from Singapore to Thailand, for example, it will boomerang back and need to cross the border back into Singapore. But, not when JBIX can do the job.

 “Bandwidth savings come from accessing a cached version of the content in Johor Bahru, instead of Singapore,” Weng said.

 Complement and alternative

While JBIX offers an alternative to Singapore Internet exchanges, Weng sees it as complementing the one other Internet exchange in Malaysia, MyIX.

 “With more than one IX, you can do load balancing and create redundancy,” he said while adding that, “Very rarely, one IX will replace another.”

 The other potential of more IX infrastructures in the country is that Internet latency reduces and it would be faster to get to the content on the Internet.

 Weng shared that barrier to entry into the e-commerce industry becomes lower, because of the cost rationalisation that is possible now.  This increases players, increases choices, and reduces prices.

 There are many more factors to be taken into consideration before that could happen, but in the meantime, a bank is expected to peer with JBIX in the near future.

 This bank would be the first from the financial services category to get onboard an Internet exchange in Malaysia.