Mr Sheriff said this during the monthly ICT for Development presentation organized by Sharing with Other People Network (SWOPNet) at the . “If you do a simple ping command to a peering ISP you will notice that it will return a 10millisecond speed as opposed to the minimum 600millisecond speed associated to satellite connections”, Sheriff said. “This means that the clients are enjoying speeds up to 60-times faster for local traffic”, he said.

The Tanzania Internet Exchange has so far attracted seven peering Internet Service Providers two more than the minimum threshold to experience any benefits. This means that there is now a huge potential for local content development, which can now be host locally and accessed within good speed. “Most ISPs used to host there sites and clients’ sites in America or Europe due to the slow links that we had across local ISPs this is now going to change,” Sheriff continued.

From the available statistics, more than 400KB of data is transmitted through the Exchange everyday with most data going through on weekdays. “This is probably because most Internet users access the Internet during the working week and may be its because they can access the Internet through their office connection”, Sheriff said. It is expected that more ISPs will join the exchange and plans are underway to have regional exchange points.

The meeting was also told that the Bank of Tanzania (BoT) is the first non-ISP peering partner at the exchange point. “This gives the exchange point a lot of legitimacy because for BoT to peer at the exchange, they must have done there homework and checked all the technical and legal aspects of the exchange,” one participant said. “What we provide as an exchange is a pipe, a shortcut to the internet, no more no less” said Bill Sangiwa, an Internet Consultant based in and in charge of the technical aspects of the exchange.

Mr Sangiwa said security is taken care by the peering ISPs who are responsible for their own networks and all the exchange does is connect them to each other using the shortest route possible so that the consumers enjoy the best possible Internet experience. The ISPs connected to the exchange point include: Africa Online, Cats-Net, COSTECH, Raha.com, SatCONet, Intafrica, and the non-IPS peer, Bank of Tanzania.

According to experts, the experience will even be better once SimuNet, the Tanzania Telecommunication Company’s data company joins the exchange. For unknown reasons and like other incumbents in other African countries, SimuNet has so-far been reluctant to join the exchange point. 

Being a multi-stakeholder initiative, the exchange point bares checks and balances on technical and operational issues and resembles the establishment of a Tanzanian internet – a network that connects various ISPs who did not have a direct connection to each other before.