Korea Internet Neutral Exchange

Korea Internet Neutral Exchange (KINX Inc.; Korean: (주)케이아이엔엑스), the only carrier-neutral Internet exchange (IX) in South Korea, is a B2B company that specializes in Internet infrastructure. KINX provides Internet data center (IDC), content delivery network (CDN), and cloud computing services to customers. The headquarters is in Seoul, South Korea. As of March 2020, KINX has 126 employees.
KINX operates a layer 2-based Internet exchange in South Korea. Its data center is carrier-neutral, which means that domestic and international Internet service providers (ISP), as well as content providers (CPs), are independent of any network providers and could freely select their peering partners. KINX is expanding its international coverage by establishing point of presence (PoP) in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Japan.
KINX is currently operating four IDCs – all carrier-neutral – in and near the Seoul area. Its IX participants include Daum-Kakao, whose popular messenger service KakaoTalk boasts more than 140 million users.
KINX's CDN solution, based on peering with domestic and international ISPs, delivers contents in a fast and stable manner. It provides streaming, cache, and downloading services. Main customers of KINX’s solution are gaming companies, such as Com2uS and Neowiz Games, that need to deliver contents to end-users, and media outlets, such as the Korea Economic Daily and the Financial News, that provide real-time news updates to their audience.
In 2012, KINX introduced 'IXcloud', becoming the first Korean company to provide public cloud service that utilizes OpenStack. It also provides support for both public and private companies' efforts to establish private cloud service. Since 2011, KINX, in partnership with AppCenter, has provided cloud service to mobile web developers for free-of-charge. In 2014, KINX signed the MOU with NEOPLY, a program managed by Neowiz Games to support startups and to provide infrastructure for cloud service.
KINX CloudHub is an advanced multi-cloud service platform that enables direct access to major international and domestic clouds including AWS, MS, Google, IBM, Tencent, Oracle, and Naver Business Platform. CloudHub service is a feature of ‘single port, many virtual circuits’, meaning that customers can save the costs of multiple circuits to each CSP. As KINX offers CloudHub service, customers now may choose hybrid cloud service with both colocation and multi-cloud service. Recently, the needs of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud services have been accelerating since diversity of the services is becoming more important.
In the early days of the Internet in South Korea, domestic Internet traffic had to go via overseas Internet exchange Points. As the demand for the Internet rose dramatically, the government had to find a way to address the network’s low quality and rising costs; furthermore, they were particularly concerned with the rapid rise in volume of Internet traffic. With these issues in mind, NCA (National Computerization Agency) established the Korea Internet eXchange (KIX), the first IX in South Korea. Due to various circumstances, however, NCA privatized KIX. In December 1996, Korea Telecom (now KT Corporation) began operating Korea Telecom Internet eXchange (KTIX), and Dacom (now LG Uplus) founded Dacom Internet eXchange (DIX). Rather than solving problems, KTIX and DIX brought out other challenges such as the rising service charges IX customers had to pay. In 1998, to address these issues, 16 ISPs, excluding KT and Dacom, hosted the 'Korea Internet Interconnection Conference', which led to the establishment of Korea Internet Neutral eXchange (KINX) in June 2000.