The Hindu Business Line : Waiting to hit the air

The National Internet Exchange of India or Nixi is waiting to take off. It promises lower bandwidth costs for the ISPs and, hopefully, faster, cheaper surfing for their customers.

THE world as we know it would come to a grinding halt if it wasn't for India's geeks, right? Well, kind of. If my uncle had wheels, he would be a wagon...

Those of you who have been taken in by the Indian-coders-uber-alles rah rah put out by our IT companies and their lobbyists will be distinctly surprised to learn that, after much dithering, the Centre is finally moving to form a joint venture with key Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country to establish an Internet exchange.

But, you ask plaintively, didn't we have one before? The answer, unfortunately, is that we didn't. And we still don't - the exchange was supposed to have gone operational on May 29 - but this date has now been set back to some day in July.

In fact, as of now, India is possibly the only country in the world that doesn't have an Internet exchange. Indian ISPs route a large part of their domestic traffic through international channels, resulting inevitably in raised operational costs for service providers and surfing costs for users.

Be that as it may, it is learnt that the joint venture will be incorporated under Section 25 of the Companies Act and will be known as the National Internet Exchange of India or Nixi.

Shorn of all the tech-babble, the Internet exchange will allow service providers to route the traffic with one another within the country, resulting in lower bandwidth costs for the ISPs and — hopefully — faster, cheaper surfing for their customers.

India being what it is, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, the country's largest service provider, is in a snit and has reportedly indicated that it will not be a party to the joint initiative. Actually, this is not too surprising as VSNL is an international long-distance telecommunications traffic carrier and, as such, will lose out on the revenues that it now books by selling bandwidth to other service providers.

However, as the Central Government is involved in the venture, VSNL may be persuaded to stop sulking and get with the programme after Nixi kicks in. And then again, that may not happen because Nixi, the way it's coming up now, will, in effect, become a de facto national backbone - which VSNL already is. An international exchange is not supposed to be a backbone.

Some of the major ISPs are also a bit hassled about the forced peering bit too. If major transit providers are arm-twisted into peering with each other, they will, in all likelihood, set up routers on Nixi, go along with the peering mandate - but withhold prefixes. The Government can, of course, exercise its clout and tell these ISPs the prefixes that they should exchange. But this may not be a very good idea in an environment allergic to a state monopoly mindset.

Further, some analysts point out that mandating ISP presence at the Internet Exchange Points (IXP) is likely to cause some resentment. After all, why would an ISP agree to pay for a leased line to the exchange and then run a router from there when Big Government is going to tell them the kind of peering that they have to go in for? IXPs don't work that way anywhere in the world.

If Nixi works well, all the credit should go to people like Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala, professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, who heads the committee formed by the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) to oversee the Nixi project.

DoIT has committed an up-front Rs 4.25 crore for setting up the exchange which, it is hoped, will be able to generate revenues from traffic routing to fund itself down the line.

As matters stand, Nixi is expected to have exchange points at Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. These locations will be interconnected for enabling the routing of inter-Internet service providers' traffic only and will not carry any intra-Internet service provider traffic.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) will, undoubtedly, be thrilled when Nixi is up and running. Concerned about the extremely poor growth of Internet services in the country, TRAI had, in September last year, presented a 10-point agenda drawn up by a multi-disciplinary task force to the Government to boost the development of the Internet in India where Net penetration in terms of the number of subscribers, is less than one per cent — 0.34 per cent, to be precise.

The regulator, in the 10-point agenda, had come out strongly in favour of an Internet exchange to cut the cost of Internet connections and bandwidth and improve the quality of service so as to "encourage Internet use and achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction."

TRAI had further observed that the setting up of an exchange would save the country foreign exchange now being spent on international bandwidth.

The way to hell etc etc... .

pratapravindran

@hotmail.com

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