India

(Warning: Post is about Indian politics and International readers can likely skip the post unless interested in Indian politics)

After the recent announcement of General Elections as well as tensions on relations with Pakistan, the whole environment is getting so political. News channels are full of people screaming about the party, the leader they support while the level of discourse has got to a very low level.

I must admit I was much more excited about elections back in 2014 as compared to now and I feel that is the case with many other people around me.

It’s kind of fun times in India with many IX’es showing up and now NIXI finally removing their traffic wise charge.

I came across this email which they sent to their member networks recently:

From: I X <[ix@nixi.in](mailto:ix@nixi.in)\>  
Sent: Thu, 21 Feb 2019 12:48:31 GMT+0530  
To: "members " <[members@nixi.in](mailto:members@nixi.in)\>  
Cc: "[ceo@nixi.in](mailto:ceo@nixi.in)" <[ceo@nixi.in](mailto:ceo@nixi.in)\>  
Subject: Change in Data Transfer Charges (X-Y)  

Dear Members,  
  
In reference to the Board's direction to reduce the current data transfer (X-Y) charges from Re. 1/GB to Rs. 0/GB. The said reduction in X-Y charges to Rs. 0/GB is being implemented with effect from 1st March 2019. 
This is for your kind information please.  
  
Thanks & Regards.  
National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI)  
[www.nixi.in](http://www.nixi.in/)

 

India has been deploying large scale optical fiber to the rual areas under NOFN / BBNL. Overall the project is not well thought off and as have written previously about it - the choice of “Gram Panchayats” may not be the best option. Furthermore it’s a project about backhual/backbone fiber and not last mile. Project vaguely expects private sector to be doing last mile with no clear plans on how it would be executed. 

As mentioned in part 1 of the post, this part contains the map of fibre point of interconnects for BBNL network. This is one of the interesting parts of the network and if executed well, it can be a really great middle mile. Though I haven’t seen any ground deployment as yet of the same. Will explore more in PoIs around my city.  

 

BBNL Fibre Point of Interconnect 

It has been some time since I started pushing Indian community for hosting RIPE Atlas Probes. These probes are small devices designed to be hosted at end user’s connection and do pre-defined as well as user-defined measurement. Measurement includes ping, trace, DNS lookup, SSL check etc. Currently, there are 61 active RIPE Atlas probes. I would say it has +/- of 7-8 probes which go offline and come back online when I request hosts to check.