We will have 50 internet exchanges in India in 18 months: Nixi CEO

In an interview with Business Standard, Anil Kumar Jain talks about the non-profit's role in building infra for broadband in India, and how it is helping the country to become a digital society

The National Internet Exchange of India (Nixi), founded in 2003, has been engaged in building the country’s internet infrastructure. It has three major focus areas -- it creates infrastructure for the internet exchange; it is a custodian of India’s country code top level domain name (CCTLD) and the 22 official regional language internationalised domain names; 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 how it is helping the country to become a digital society. Edited excerpts:

Over the last 18 years, how has Nixi evolved as an organisation that is leading India’s adoption of the internet?

In 2003 Nixi was formed to solve the latency and cost issues in the adoption of 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 time-consuming 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 internet exchanges 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 internet service providers (ISPs) are available. IEs have become a fundamental infrastructure requirement 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.

One of Nixi’s efforts has been to increase regional-language adoption as well as usage of the .IN country code top level domain names (CCTLD) and .Bharat. 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, India is the only country in the world that has 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 level of 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 within the country should be reduced.

What about the universal acceptance (UA) programme that ICANN was working on to 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 just a small step towards this.

The reason for the UA to yet make an impact is that ICANN’s technology on UA is not mature even today. Several experts are still working on it. But we have reached a stage wherein 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 now?

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. Here we show which companies in India 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.

India has been demanding that at least one root server should be in the country. Is there any update on this?

Across the world there are only 13 root servers, the majority in the US, one each in Japan and Singapore, and two in Europe. Root servers basically translate readable host names into IP addresses. That is how we as users reach the right website. We do not feel there is a need for a root server in India, because we have root server instances. There are 4,000 instances in the world that do the same work. India has 33 mirror root servers and three are funded by Nixi. We have pitched ICANN to locate an IPV6 root server in India. We should be sufficiently represented in that segment.