The chief Executive officer IXPN Mr. Muhammed Rudman spoke
to DigitalSENSE Remmy Nweke and shared some achievement of the eXchange Point . Excerpts:
INTERNET Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) is a company limited by guaranty which means that it is not-for-profit organization and we are also a membership base organization where members that are connected to the exchange are majorly our constituency, our stakeholders.
IXPN actually is a company that provide interconnectivity services to various ISPs, telcos, higher education’s institutions and other Internet Protocol (IP) centric organizations, so that they can exchange traffic between themselves, locally without passing that same traffic internationally.
Between the time IXPN was setup and now what will you say has been the key achievement?
The key achievement is that we have right now all the major service providers in Lagos especially connected all the telcos; all the GSM operators that are connected, majority of the ISPs are also connected. Some of the higher educational institutions and the academia are also connected. So, that is a reasonable achievement and also that is one aspect of it.
Our traffic at the eXchange Point has significantly grown from the level we started, which is about almost zero traffic to right now, about reaching almost 3GB of traffic. We have been reducing a lot IXPs and telcos bandwidth cost and at the same time at the eXchange Point we have installed critical infrastructure for the internet, like the F-route servers for the Domain Name System (DNS) are located locally at the eXchange Point.
We also have the .NG ccTLD – Country Code Top Level Domain - registry and the DNS primary servers are also connected at the eXchange Point. Locally IXPN has implemented as a onetime server for the public, which can be reached to from .NG which is also locally.
So, these are all major significant achievements. We have also succeeded in establishing branches in Port Harcourt and Abuja and we are heading towards Kano, Enugu and other parts of the country.
When you say you are heading towards Kano, Enugu and other parts of the country can you give us an idea of what the level is like in terms of when it could be realized?
Yes, possibly before the middle of next year. We are actually looking at before the end of this year those branches will have been functional by now, if not for the challenges we had.
That is Kano and Enugu?
Yes, Kano and Enugu; the major challenge we had was the fibre interconnectivity. Had it been we have fibre interconnectivity between the sites they could have been ready by now. But we hope that since we are part of the National Broadband Council that by next year we will have the interconnectivity in the various sites and also establishment of the additional branches.
Where did you see us going with what we have, because from your own narration we have made some progress, but moving forward?
Ok, moving forward, in the near future the eXchange Point is going to be very critical aspect of the national infrastructure; where we have all the various branches existing and functioning properly, which means that regional traffic within Nigeria, will remain within that region. ISPs and telcos can use us as fill-over point where they can swap capacity within themselves.
Fill over?
Yes. And also, the schools can use us, because right now we have the NREN - National Research and Educational Network project by NUC – National University Commission, Ministry of Education to interconnect some Federal Universities, but with the establishment of the eXchange Point means is very possible to have other Schools that are not Federal University also connected to the National Research and Educational Network because part of the less of the National Research and Educational Network will be connected to the eXchange Point in the various location that they exist, which means that colleges of education you know Polytechnics research institutions can now connect to the eXchange Point in those various locations and they can now have access to the National Research and Educational Network as well as the private universities and State Universities as well.
Within the National Network on research how many Schools do we have connected?
Now, I think the first phase in the project is about 27 Federal Universities. They have a second phase where they will connect the rest of the schools, but I don’t think in their programme they have any place that they are going to connect private Institutions and State Universities and that is where we come in, because they are connected to the exchange point and the other schools are connected to the eXchange Point it means that they can share and collaborate between themselves for the education purposes.
Especially in eLearning?
Yes, that’s what I am saying in eLearning, they are sharing anything for education purposes.
Congratulations for being part of the National Broadband Council.
Thank you.
The Broadband Council is to implement the broadband plan, and then what are you looking upto in terms of the council achieving?
The council is trying to achieve the goals and plans that were drafted. It’s a well articulated plan and we intend to make sure that is well implemented. So, we are there to make sure that its properly done. So, if you want to know what we intend to achieve; you go back to the broadband plan, you will see all the targets and within the period of the span of the few years to come what we intend to do. We are seriously looking into that to make sure that it happens.
What did you think of access now in Nigeria especially on the internet access?
We still have challenge. It still a problem in such a way that we have access majorly in cities they are still underserved areas and unserved areas in Nigeria. They are people who want access, they have access, but in some places they have limited access and they are some places they don’t have our access at all, that is zero access. But you know this is where the broadband council comes in and they are really seriously pushing to make sure that all the underserved and unserved areas have internet access at least before 2018.
You talked about extending your services to Kano, what of the one in Enugu?
Very soon, as well. Honestly, Enugu is going to come first and then followed by Kano. We want to make sure that at least we covered the six geo-political zones in the country and the whole essence is to localize traffic within those regions at the same time make it more resilient. The internet will become more resilient so that we have critical centers in each of the geo-political zones.
So, how are you battling with power and some other challenges, given our environment here?
Is true! It’s a very tough environment for business, but at the same time we are always collaborating with other operators, especially career neutral operators to make sure that we established the facilities together. In Abuja, for instance, we are working with Medallion Communications, of which they are interconnect; an interconnect clearing house for voice. So, that we can share the cost. We are co-locating with them in Abuja.
In Port Harcourt, we are also working with a carrier neutral facility, a company call Interconnect Clearing House of Nigeria; to setup a POP – Point of Presence - within their co-location facility, so as you can see to reduce cost for that is the whole purpose of the eXchange Point.
We don’t want to be running generator sets 24/7 in the process of trying to save cost for ISPs thereby incurring more cost by running generators. Wherever we go, we actually collaborate with other service providers on ground to establish a branch.
Given that the IXPN is all about reducing cost locally, do you think we are matching up that kind of idea with the level of local content that we are producing?
Yes. The question is very clear about local internet content in Nigeria. Yes, because the whole traffic at the eXchange Point rely on the local internet content. If there is no content it means that people cannot browse through the eXchange Point, so, the content is coming up because you know formally it was really difficult towards content in Nigeria, but coming of the eXchange Point we can see data centers springing up all over the place. People are getting more aware now on the relevant of the internet content on the entire internet ecosystem.
Hosting companies are coming up in Nigeria where formally we don’t have any hosting company although right now hosting companies are now coming up. We believe that in future the content in Nigeria will really be good and that is when the eXchange Point we make an impact to the entire ecosystem in Nigeria.
But for now, the local content is very small and if I may say so we have collaborated with the Nigeria Internet Registration Association they come up with the forum called the Local Internet Content Forum (LICF) in 2013 to bring all the key stakeholders to discuss issues of local content, what are the challenges why are people not hosting content in locally. We bring in the key stakeholders such as the ISP the telcos the dotNG, ccTLD registrars and some of the registrar people that have content on our hosting content abroad like IrokoTV and all other content providers like bloggers and the rest to come together to discuss issues of local hosting and I am happy to see that we can see a kind of a paradigm shift from those and the key stakeholder towards localizing content.
Ok so you know we are making progress in that?
Exactly!
Now just on a final note what will be your message to Nigerians?
My message is that everybody should be patriotic enough to register .NG domains at the same time host that content locally because if we don’t have our content locally it means that we have to go outside the country to fetch that content and it will affect generally the end users. So, my message is that we should all push up local content.
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