Chennai to get Internet Exchange in Feb

BANGALORE: The Chennai node of the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) will be operational in the next one month. According to Government of India Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Director, Dr. Govind, this will be followed by the activation of the last final node of Calcutta within a short period of time.

"The first two nodes of Delhi and Mumbai have been operational for the past few months already with 13 and three ISPs respectively already registered and using the services. The infrastructure is ready in Chennai and should start operations in February. We have also chosen the location in Calcutta which will be somewhere close to Salt Lake City," informed Dr. Govind. He was speaking on the sidelines of the first day of the ‘First South Asian IPv6 Summit’ being held in Bangalore. The summit is a joint effort between the IPv6 forum and SANOG.

The NIXI was set up around September 2003, as an initiative of the ISP Association of India and the Dept of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and IT, Govt. of India with an investment of close to Rs five crore. It was set up with the primary aim of connecting ISPs across India at common points, nearest to their respective locations, so as to enable exchange of domestic internet traffic amongst themselves and ensure that this traffic is routed within India to avoid their transit through multiple international hops.

"Routing local traffic domestically instead of through multi national lines gives several advantages to ISPs including upto 15 percent in cost reduction, along with reduction in bandwidth consumption. But there are still certain issues to be tackled including routing procedures and tariff rates before the NIXI can realize its full potential," said co founder of NetMagic Solutions Sharad Sanghi.

There has been a sharp divide among ISPs on whether NIXI should adopt the open routing solution or promise a minimum number of routes to ISPs. Representatives of NIXI along with many of the major ISPs of the country, including Sify, will be meeting on January 31 at Chennai to decide on the routing procedures along with the tariff rate to be levied on the ISPs. So far ISPs had been allowed to register free. These suggestions will be taken over to the board meeting scheduled for early February where the board, consisting of 13 members, is expected to finalize the same.

"There is a lot of talk on a legislative mandate that specifies that ISPs in India should route local traffic within Indian limits. Discussion is happening in the government levels though one cannot tell whether it will take shape and if so, when it will," said Sanghi.

A speaker at the forum, who did not wish to be named, said that the reason for the slow progress in the setting up and work of NIXI could be ascribed to the 'crab attitude' of Indian ISPs who unlike international ISPs refuse to co-operate on the backend. This in spite of the fact that, there are huge advantages in doing so. The speaker hoped that the decisions made in the next few meetings will solve these issues and NIXI can really take off.

(CyberMedia News Service)