‘India will have 50 internet exchanges in 18 months’
The National Internet Exchange of India (Nixi), founded in 2003, has three major focus areas — it creates infrastructure for the internet exchange; it is the custodian of India’s country code top level domain name .IN; and it seeks to increase the adoption of IPV6 technology. ANIL KUMAR JAIN, Chief Executive Officer, Nixi, in an interview with
Shivani Shinde, talks about the non-profit’s critical role in building infrastructure for broadband in India, and in helping it to become a digital society. Edited excerpts:
How has nixie vol vedas an organisation that is leading india’ s adoption of the internet?
In 2003 Nixi was formed to solve the latency and cost issues in adopting the internet in the country. We then did not have servers in India, which meant that anytime anyone was looking to find something on the internet, it would be routed through undersea cables using international bandwidth, which was a very expensive and timeconsuming affair. Today almost 92-93 per cent of internet traffic is in India. We are a platform where ISPS, content providers and data centres terminate on us, so exchange of information becomes easy.
From one internet exchange (IE) in India we have nine now and in the next 18 months we will take it up to 50. These IES will be opened in tier II and III cities like Jaipur, Lucknow and Trivandrum, where ISPS are available. IES have become a fundamental infrastructure need for the growth of the internet. Our consumer base includes 29 lakh .IN users, 125 ISPS and CDNS as members, 8.8 billion IPV6 addresses and 11.8 million IPV4 addresses. We are the second-largest users of broadband in the world.
Ni xi has been trying to increase regional-language adoption as well as usage of the. in country code domain name. how has that grown? Nixi has been managing the domain business since 2005. Today we have 20 lakh .IN customers. The number of customers that are adopting .IN on a monthly basis is much higher than those adopting the .com domain. It is becoming a preferred domain.
India is a unique country with several languages and for us to be able to increase internet adoption we will need regional language domain names, too. After seven to eight years of collaboration with ICANN, we are the only country in the world with local domains in all 22 official regional languages. So far, we have focused on getting the internet to people who access the internet in regional languages. Our next effort is to cater to people who cannot read or write. We want to build voice-based capability into internet services. Internet adoption should be inclusive in nature and the internet divide in the country should be reduced.
What about the universal acceptance (U a) programme th a tic ann was working onto solve the regional language issue on the internet?
UA of all domain names and email addresses requires that every piece of software is able to accept, validate, process, store and display them correctly and consistently. ICANN has been putting in lots of effort into converting this system into UA. We have now decided to implement UA in the country on a large scale.
The Union government has started the National Language Translation Mission, one of whose objectives is that the internet is consumed in local languages. That is the overall mission, so UA will be a small step towards this.
The reason for UA to yet make an impact is that ICANN’S technology on UA is not mature even today. Experts are still working on it. But we have reached a stage where UA can be used in some languages, if not all. As per ICANN’S roadmap, by 2024 they want to see 5-10 per cent of the world population adopting UA in their local languages.
Ipv6 is your other big focus area. are businesses moving from ipv4 to ipv6?
We sell both IPV4 and IPV6. IPV4 is getting exhausted across the world and Nixi has taken the onus of seeing that all new users in India will get IPV6 addresses and those on IPV4 migrate to IPV6. The advantage of IPV6 is that addresses are unlimited. Whatever number of new computing devices are expected to come, IPV6 will be able to cater to that demand. We have focused on three things. One, we have started the Nixi Academy, where all the details of IPV6 are explained in a curriculum format. The total duration of the course is 10-15 hours, but divided into small capsules. This is a certified course. We have seen a huge uptake for this from international countries. We are adding new technology capsules.
Two, we have initiated a group called IPV Guru, which handholds those who are finding it a challenge to migrate from IPV4 to IPV6. Finally, we started the NIXI-IPV6 index, which shows companies in India that have adopted IPV6. For instance, Jio has adopted IPV6 94-96 per cent. The next effort in the adoption of IPV6 will be to get websites to adopt it. We will not only motivate website-owners to move to IPV6, but if they need financial support, we may also help.