Policies

Time for a quick followup blog post. On 26th April of this year I blogged about broken connectivity of F root server which was hosted in NIXI Chennai. Apart from that blog post, I did informed ISC which operates F root (NIXI was host on behalf of them in India). In my open email on APNIC mailing list, I got a reply from Network Operations Center of ISC that they will verify and will take necessary action. Within 48 hours of that email they figured out root cause and since they couldn’t fix it right at that point, they pulled plug off from that root server.

NIXI i.e National Internet Exchange of India is well known for it’s inefficiency and for its bad policies. I am posting this blog post to discuss some of them.  

Bit of background:

NIXI is one (and only) Indian IXP i.e Internet Exchange Point established in 2003 so as to facilitate peering between Indian ISPs. Before this, there were lot of cases when Indian ISP’s were connecting to each other from outside India in Singapore and Europe. Thus NIXI established few exchanges in key cities where necessary infrastructure was provided to ISP’s to “peer”.  With peering, the strict technical meaning is that exchange of traffic between ISPs.