'NIXI'ng an opportunity

India's Internet exchange sports decent traffic, but needs to do more.

The three-year old National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) "� set up to ensure that Internet traffic originating in, and destined for India, should be routed within India "� could be credited for its firm grip on at least 20 per cent of domestic traffic, or could be faulted for letting the other 80 per cent leave the shores of India.

Either way, there is a clear need to up the traffic that stays within India since traffic leaving the shores means avoidable consumption of relatively expensive international bandwidth.

Today, 27 ISPs including VSNL, are connected to NIXI. While this is just about a sixth of the overall 150 ISPs in the country, they account for over 90 per cent of the overall Internet traffic.

For the retail Internet user, this means that browsing becomes faster "� the NIXI website says delays would be reduced to 0.2-0.4 seconds against 0.7-2 seconds in a non-NIXI situation "� and cheaper, since there is saving on international bandwidth, and on national bandwidth too, since ISPs no longer need to connect to each other. However, no one is willing to quantify the cost declines.

"NIXI has benefitted us and brought our costs down substantially over a period of time...don't ask for the numbers but we have been passing on some of the benefits to customers," says Sharad Sanghi, the CEO and MD of Netmagic Solutions "� a company providing Internet access and data hosting services to corporate India.

With such a compelling cost argument, why are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) not using the domestic exchange? "It is a legacy issue," says Pankaj Agrawala, joint secretary in the department of information technology, currently holding the charge of CEO of NIXI too.

The Internet used to be a US-centric phenomenon and the then state-owned VSNL used to be the monopoly provider of international bandwidth. It was only too happy to route all traffic overseas "� it made money "� and anyway, there was hardly any domestic hosting or traffic.

Now, though domestic traffic has increased, the habit of using VSNL, and international bandwidth, has not changed.

"NIXI was an intervention by the government using the ISPs as a willing group," says Agrawala, "to remove distortions that were created in a monopoly situation."

The promise of these benefits was the lure for the government to provide the initial Rs 5 crore grant to set up the NIXI, on the condition that it become self-sustaining subsequently. That it is today "� its revenue streams comprising fees that ISPs pay and income from the ".IN" registry that it runs.

The Telecom Regulatory Association of India (TRAI), however, feels there is "sub-optimal utilisation of NIXI's infrastructure". That is a view that is echoed in a recent OECD report on Internet traffic which highlights how "some Indian ISPs continue to exchange traffic on the west coast of the United states".

The TRAI solution, laid out in a widely publicised recommendation two months ago, is to set up additional NIXI nodes "� currently each of the four main metros has one "� and interconnect them.

It also recommends subsidies for smaller ISPs to connect to the NIXI and most importantly, makes a case for "restructuring" (read professionalisation) of the NIXI board which has become dominated by government representatives. And we all know the importance of keeping the government away from the Internet (think blocked blogs).