Page History

Dr Angus Hay, PrEng, CEng, MIET, MIEEE, FSAIEE, is Regional Executive - South Africa for Africa Datta Centres, a business of Cassava Technologies. He was part of the team that started Neotel where he held various roles, including CTO. He has been involved in a variety of aspects of information and communications technology.

Dr Hay was President of the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (SAIEE) in 2010, and received the Institute’s Young Achiever award in 1999. He was Chair of the Management Committee of the West Africa Cable System (WACS), and is a Director of the Number Portability Company, a board member of the Africa Data Centres Association, and a member of ISPA’s INX Committee for the past two years.

As a postgraduate student in the early 1990s, he took part in the establishment of the Internet between academic institutions in South Africa.

Dean Pillay, the Founder and CEO of Agile Solutions Provider, has spent over 10 years investing in his passion for building and optimising ISP networks across Africa.  Before starting Agile Solutions Provider, Dean worked for multiple ISPs and is a certified Core Network Engineer (Cisco, Juniper and Huawei).

Dean is a current member of the JINX Technical Group, and believes that he can add more value to INX-ZA and its mission by also being part of its management committee.  Dean is passionate about strengthening Africa's internet infrastructure.  

Edrich de Lange has been working in the ISP field since 2008, and is currently a consultant to various ISPs in and around Durban. He has been on board of various non-profit organisations and in fields as diverse as the information technology community;  orchestral arts;  and sailing, and has a deep love of community involvement.

Edrich is passionate about peering and the utility it brings in the networking industry.  As co-founder of ZANOG he's helped pioneer a community-led CDN caching system that has improved the network performance (and cost savings) of operators in Cape Town and Durban immeasurably! 

Edrich is a firm believer in change through action, passing on information through education, and you'll often find him elbows deep "in the trenches" helping to run training workshops.

Graham Beneke is a seasoned network engineer and a prominent figure in South Africa’s internet landscape. With a career spanning over two decades, he has made significant contributions to network architecture, peering strategies, and internet policy. As a technical specialist at eNetworks, a division of Datacentrix, Beneke has been instrumental in advancing the country’s digital infrastructure. 

Beneke’s leadership roles include serving as the chairperson of the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) and its Internet Exchange Point division, INX-ZA. Under his guidance, INX-ZA expanded its footprint by establishing multi-site Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban, enhancing network resilience and reducing latency for local internet users.  His efforts have been pivotal in promoting local peering, thereby improving internet performance and affordability in South Africa.

Beyond his technical achievements, Beneke has played a vital role in shaping national broadband policy. In 2014, he was appointed to the National Broadband Advisory Council, where he provided industry insights to inform the country’s broadband strategies.  His commitment to fostering a robust and inclusive internet ecosystem makes him a valuable nominee for the INX-ZA INXCOM committee.

Riaan is actively involved with operations of INX-ZA environment from 2009 and has contributed to its excellent track record of unplanned outages.  Riaan is currently a member of the INX-ZA technical committee and have contributed to a number of projects such as the multisite expansion.  Riaan is forming part of the INX-ZA committee from 2016 and is willing to stand for another term provided this is acceptable by the current committee members and the community.

Riaan’s biography follows:
Riaan has more than 19 years' experience working in the industry with extensive experience on Service Provider Backbone networks.  Riaan is currently forming part of the team responsible for the network design of Metrofibre Networx (core, aggregation and access).  Before that Riaan has been at Internet Solutions in various positions with the last one the lead engineer of the team responsible for the last mile access network (consisting of more than 300 access sites).

Riaan is a big supporter of peering and the peering ecosystem and has first-hand experience its benefits of keeping the traffic local and improving overall client experience, and leveraging from the inherent redundancy that peering is bringing by rerouting around problems and even at a stage assisted another operator with international capacity when all of theirs dropped… all of this over the peering fabric! 

Riaan’s vision is that by being part of the INX-ZA committee:

• He can contribute to the ongoing efforts to have INX-ZA community-run exchanges available and operating optimally.
• He can propose and comment on technological changes including the potential implication to the INX-ZA exchanges.
• He can comment on what operators want from an exchange and the difficulties encountered on a daily basis.