According to Muhammed Rudman, IXPN’s CEO, the forum provides a valuable platform for collaboration, interaction, and sharing IXPN milestones with its members.

He emphasized the organization’s dedication to building a stronger internet exchange ecosystem and advancing Nigeria’s digital landscape through efficient interconnectivity, robust collaborations, and the seamless exchange of ideas.

“IXPN plays a pivotal role in ensuring fast, reliable, and secure internet exchange services for organizations across the country. Thus, this forum offers an important opportunity to engage with our valued customers, address challenges, celebrate our successes, and envision a brighter digital future for Nigeria,” said Rudman.”

Highlighting key milestones achieved in 2024, Rudman noted IXPN’s recognition as a MANRS-compliant Internet Exchange Point, demonstrating its commitment to secure and reliable Internet routing.

He also cited multiple link upgrades between key Points of Presence (PoPs), including Digital Realty (Medallion) to Equinix (MDXi), Rack Centre, and ADC, significantly increasing capacity.

Another key achievement was the deployment of Microsoft Connected Cache to reduce latency and optimize bandwidth utilization for Microsoft static content.

Looking ahead to 2025, IXPN ‘s planned projects and initiatives include establishing additional exchange points in other states, attracting more content providers to the country, setting up CDNs and caches in regional IXPN PoPs, offering VLAN services within Lagos and supporting remote peering, and upgrading core devices and main links.

IXPN’s core functions include keeping Nigerian internet traffic local, reducing costs associated with accessing local content, enhancing local connectivity, improving the overall internet experience, promoting local content creation, and serving as a centralized launch point for services.

As of today, the organization currently boasts 125 members, seven PoPs in Lagos (ICNL, Medallion, Rack Centre, MDXi, ADC, OADC & Cloud Exchange), and additional PoPs in six other cities: Abuja, Port Harcourt, Kano, Enugu, Delta, and Gombe.

IXPN also manages a peak aggregate traffic of 900 Gbps.

The move can be described as a response to the demands of its customers for local hosting of contents and data.

Tagged as LOC2, the new data centre comes with an additional one megawatt of IT capacity and will be interconnected with the company’s existing LOS1 data center, touted as the most interconnected facility in the West African sub-region and the top peering point for the region.

Speaking at the launch, which attracted stakeholders from Nigeria’s telecom and IT industry, including the telecom regulator, Engr. Ikechukwu Nnamani, Chief Executive Officer of Medallion Data Centre, noted that the LOS2 is an extension of the existing data centre, which has run out of space.

“The launch of the LOS2 today is an extension because we’ve run out of space in the last one, and customers needed more space and capacity. So, we must view this as an extension of this whole part of Lagos infrastructure development. We still have a long story coming up under the facilities at Lekki, which is part of the Africa submarine cable,” he said.

The LOS2 Data Centre is a 3-floor building with one megawatt of IT capacity and 232 racks. It also comes with 8 kilowatt of rack density, 230V of PDU model and a dual power supply.

Other features include;

• It expands the peering and connectivity capacity currently available in LOS1
• It is less than 1km from the hyperscale LOS# datacenter currently under development
• Redundant fiber connection to LOS1. LOS3, LLK1, LKK2
• Tier 3+ DLR Global operational standard

Also, in terms of electrical, the data center comes with an electrical IT system topology is in 2N configuration, each power room consists of 2600KW UPS system and VRLA batteries providing 5min EOL at 1200 KW per side, cooling technology is DX, redundancy is N+1 in all rooms and a 2x2650kVA generators.

Also speaking, Mike Hollands, Vice President of Market Development at Digital Realty, expressed delight on the launch of the data center, saying Digital Realty was attracted to Medallion having seen the tremendous value in the original data centre.

“We saw 70 networks present here already. We saw the Internet exchange of Nigeria doing tremendously well from this facility. And it’s incredible now that we’re able to build and expand on that by the facility that we’ve built right next door, brand new and ready for our customers to continue and grow and expand and help make the infrastructure the internet infrastructure of Nigeria stronger and better,” he told Journalists on the sideline.

He explained that there has been a tremendous amount of demand by existing customers to expand all the metrics in Nigeria as the economy grows, as people use mobile and social media more.

“There’s a huge demand for expansion and this is what laws to facilitate. It allows the growth of the services that our customers offer. And at the end of the day, the citizens of Lagos and Nigeria are the ones that benefit from better mobile and interconnection services,” he added.

The new state-of-the-art facility will formally open for service on 24 October and will offer customers an additional one megawatt of IT capacity.

LOS2, located on Medallion’s Victoria Island campus, will be interconnected with Medallion’s existing LOS1 data center, currently rated as the most interconnected facility in the West African sub-region and the top peering point for the region.

This makes the campus an ideal location for subsea cable, metro fiber, mobile services, over-the-top providers, and the country’s internet exchange, the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (“IXPN”), to connect efficiently in a low latency environment, enabling these connectivity providers to better serve and grow their customer bases.

According to IXPN, more than 68% of its traffic is exchanged at Medallion’s data centre in Lagos, demonstrating the important role it plays in Nigeria’s connectivity ecosystem.

LOS2 also provides access to the 2Africa subsea cable system through diverse fiber routes to Medallion’s LKK1 facility, the infrastructure supporting the operations of the 2Africa subsea cable system, thereby enabling reliable, high-speed connections to the new cable’s 46 locations across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

For over a decade, Medallion has been at the forefront of the Nigerian digital economy through the provisioning of carrier neutral data centre services in both Lagos and Abuja.

Over that period, the company has solidified its spot as the “go-to” provider for fast, efficient, and cost-effective data centre and connectivity services when time to market and affordability has become essential.

On 27 October 2023, Medallion will formally rebrand its services and facilities to Digital Realty, one of the largest global providers of Carrier neutral datacenter services, colocation, and interconnection solutions, at an event taking place at Eko Hotels and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos.

The event will host leaders from Nigeria’s telecom and IT industry to celebrate Medallion’s customers, the opening of the new data centre and the rebranding.

The acquisition of Medallion in 2021 marked a significant milestone in Digital Realty’s Pan-African expansion strategy.

Since then, the company has committed to invest more than US$2bn over the next decade in Africa’s technology infrastructure and has already progressed acquisitions and expansions aimed at delivering on this commitment, most recently with the acquisition of Teraco in August 2022, South Africa’s leading carrier-neutral data centre and interconnection services provider.

More about Digital Realty

Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions.

PlatformDIGITAL, the company’s global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx) solution methodology for powering innovation and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges.

Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 25+ countries on six continents.