About Lesotho Internet Exchange

An internet exchange Point is a facility that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and content providers exchange traffic directly.

If ISP A connects directly to the Exchange point, where ISP B and Content Provider C are also present, it means that ISP A is interconnected directly with all the peers that are present (or those that they have agreement with, in case of a closed peering model). If ISP A wants to talk to ISP B, they traffic goes from A to the exchange point and to B, this is more like a direct and short route, which saves on the upstream bandwidth and improves latency.

Lesotho Internet Exchange Point (LIXP) was founded in 2011 with the help of Internet Society (ISOC) and Lesotho Communications Authority (LCA) by the internet community. LIXP Association owns the LIXP.
In its inception, the exchange had 4 peers, namely:

• National University of Lesotho (NUL)
• Ministry of Communications, Science and Technology (MCST)
• Econet Telecom Lesotho (ETL)
• Vodacom Lesotho

At that time, LIXP was hosted by NUL on its premises at Institute of Extra Mural Studies (IEMS). In 2014, the Exchange faced some internal problems and collapsed. It was relaunched in 2017, and migrated from NUL to LCA data centre which is till its present location. From 2017, LIXP managed to host 2 content providers: Google Caches and Akamai with the help of government of Lesotho bandwidth for feeding them. There is also an ICANN root server.

There are four more peers:

• Lesotho Electricity Company Communications (LECC)
• Comnet Lesotho
• LEO PTY Ltd
• Lesotho Network Information Centre (LsNIC)