National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI)

Context:

National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) today celebrated its 18th Foundation Day. For the last 18 years, NIXI has been contributing to Indian Internet Ecosystem.

About NIXI:

• NIXI is a not for profit Organization under section 8 of the Companies Act 2013,
• It was registered on 19th June, 2003.
• NIXI was set up for peering of ISPs among themselves for the purpose of routing the domestic traffic within the country, instead of taking it all the way to US/Abroad, thereby resulting in better quality of service (reduced latency) and reduced bandwidth charges for ISPs by saving on International Bandwidth.
• NIXI is managed and operated on a Neutral basis, in line with the best practices for such initiatives globally.
• .IN is India’s Country Code Top Level domain (ccTLD). The Govt. of India delegated the operations of IN Registry to NIXI in 2004. The IN Registry operates and manages India’s .IN ccTLD.

The Main Objects to be pursued by the Company on its incorporation are:

1. To Promote Internet.
2. To set up, when needed, in select location(s)/parts/regions of India Internet Exchanges/Peering Points.
3. To enable effective and efficient routing, peering, transit and exchange of the Internet traffic within India.
4. To continuously work for enhancing and improving the quality of Internet and Broadband services.
5. Set up. Internet Domain Name Operations and related activities.

About the Three New Initiatives:

IPv6 Expert Panel (IP Guru):

• It is a group to extend support to all the Indian entities who are finding it technically challenging to migrate and adopt IPv6. It will be offering its services free of cost.
  • It’s a joint effort of the Department of Telecom (DOT), MeitY and industry.

NIXI Academy:

• NIXI Academy is created to educate technical/non-technical people in India to learn and relearn technologies like IPv6 which are normally not taught in Educational Institutes.
  • Successful candidates (after passing examination) can take a certificate from NIXI, which will be useful to find/upgrade jobs in the Industry.

NIXI-IP-INDEX:

• NIXI has developed an IPv6 index portal for the Internet community.
  • NIXI-IP-INDEX portal will showcase the IPv6 adoption rate in India and across the world. It can be used to compare IPv6 Indian adoption rate with other economies in the world.
  • It will also include details about web adoption in IPv6, IPv6 traffic etc.

Benefit of Transitioning to IPv6:

• The most well-known benefit that IPv6 offers is the exponential address space, practically inexhaustible in the foreseeable future. Therefore, it allows simple, seamless, and cost-effective connectivity for service providers, enterprises and end-users.
  • It is considered especially important with the impending move to 5G, which will massively increase the total number of devices connecting to the Internet.
  • The IPv6 operating systems automatically create two IPv6 addresses. One IPv6 with randomised MAC address in the suffix to hide the device identity and another IPv6 with real MAC address which is only used for end-to-end encrypted applications.
  • IPv6 has a privacy protocol to protect end-user privacy. The current internet (v4) lacks effective privacy and effective authentication mechanisms.

Impact of NIXI

• Its efforts have seen fruition as India surpassed 2.7 million registrations of .in domain.
• It make India the third-largest nation in Asia in the country-centric, top-level domain growth.
• NIXI have .IN Registry, managing and operation of .IN country code domain.
• Further the company has also set out to promote local content with its .भारत(Bharath) initiatives.
• The .भारत domain is now available in all 22 official languages.
• India is the only country to provide domain in 22 official Indian Languages.