One Exchange, Three Regions: DE-CIX Malaysia From Johor Bahru To Penang
DE-CIX Malaysia is an internet exchange in Malaysia with access in three regions: Johor Bahru, Kuala Lumpur and Cyberjaya, and Penang. A fourth, in Kedah on the Thai border, is targeted for the end of 2026 or January 2027. Together they give one exchange that spans the Peninsula from the Singapore border to the north.
This post maps each region, what it offers and why ports in more than one region make a network more resilient.
DE-CIX Malaysia’s Current Footprint
DE-CIX Malaysia offers four kinds of service. GlobePEER is public peering through the route servers. VirtualPNI is a private link to one network over your existing exchange port. DirectCLOUD is a private on-ramp to AWS and Azure. For Google, DE-CIX is one of the first Internet Exchange operators globally with Google VPP Gold status, so Google’s public services are reachable through the exchange. Service availability can differ by location, so each location page lists what is offered there.
Each Region Serves A Distinct Traffic Need
Each region was added where traffic needed a local hand-off. The Johor Bahru exchange sits near the Causeway, where Malaysian and Singapore networks meet, and cross-border connectivity under the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone is now one of the region’s main growth drivers. Kuala Lumpur and Cyberjaya serve the Klang Valley’s enterprises, carriers and content networks.
Penang IX powered by DE-CIX sits at Open DC PE2 in Bayan Lepas, close to Malaysia’s semiconductor and electronics base; Penang alone accounted for 48.9% of national exports in June 2026. The Kedah node at Open DC D8-1 sits inside the Delapan Special Border Economic Zone, within reach of four cable landing stations, two of them in Thailand at Satun and Songkhla (TechWire Asia, 23 Sep). Its launch moved back by several months while the site completed a demand-driven capacity upgrade.
Two Regions Are More Resilient Than One
A single port in one city shares that city’s power, buildings and fibre routes. If any of them fails, every path through that port fails with it.
Ports in two regions sit on separate grids, in separate buildings and usually on separate long-haul fibre. Each region has its own route servers, so routes learned in one region stay available if another is disrupted. Traffic keeps flowing and simply hands off in the region that is still up.
Two ports do not create diversity on their own. The cross-connects, transport, routers and BGP policy behind them have to be diverse too, and failover should be tested one failure domain at a time in a planned maintenance window.
There is a latency gain as well. Light in fibre adds roughly one millisecond of round-trip time for every 100km. A Penang network that peers in Penang avoids sending local traffic to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore and back.
Three Common Multi-Region Setups
- Two regions for resilience: a port in Kuala Lumpur and a port in Johor Bahru or Penang, each with sessions to the local route servers.
- Three regions for reach: add the third region to hand off traffic close to users in the south, the Klang Valley and the north.
- One backbone between them: your own network, or a carrier wavelength, carries traffic between regions when it needs to.
The ecosystem is ready for this. Internet Society Pulse reports that 89% of Malaysia’s 268 domestic networks can already exchange traffic through an internet exchange point (Internet Society Pulse).
Kedah Is The Next Region
The Kedah node at D8-1 is next. It will add a fourth region on the Thai border, for traffic between Malaysia, Thailand and Indochina. We cover what a border peering point changes on 12 November. Until it is announced as live, treat it as a forthcoming access point rather than a current one. The location pages for Johor Bahru, Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Kedah carry the details.
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