• The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) celebrated the 20th Foundation Day of the organisation on June 19.

• The government-supported NIXI plans to add 75 new internet exchanges this year, which will cover tier-2 and tier-3 level towns and cities. 

• The internet exchanges closer to the users in smaller towns will help in improving internet speed, save bandwidth and boost the digital economy in and around where the exchanges will be set up.

• In the last 20 years, NIXI has set up 77 exchanges. 

• NIXI also handles the registration of website names ending with ‘.in’, technically called country code top-level domain (ccTLD), and ‘.bharat’ in Hindi script.

What is the purpose of NIXI?

NIXI is a not-for-profit organisation, established in 2003, for peering of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) among themselves and routing the domestic traffic within the country, with seed funding from the department of information technology.

NIXI is performing the following three activities:

1) Internet Exchange

The Internet Exchange Nodes have been successful in ensuring peering of ISPs among themselves for the purpose of routing the domestic traffic within the country, instead of taking abroad, thereby resulting in better quality of service (reduced latency) and reduced bandwidth charges for ISPs by saving on international bandwidth. The maximum volume of Internet traffic being handled by NIXI at present is 1.1 Tbps.

2) .IN Registry and Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs):

Since 2005, NIXI has managed the .in registry (www.registry.in). As many as 153 registrars have been accredited to offer ‘.in’ domain name registration worldwide to customers. This has helped proliferation of web hosting in the country and promotion of Indian language content on the Internet. ‘.in’ is India’s top-level domain on the Internet. Like ‘.com’, ‘.in’ can be used for email, websites, and other applications. Over 31 lakh ‘.in’ domain names have been registered till November 30, 2022. 

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in all 22 official languages are launched and over 16,000 IDNs domain names have been registered till date.

3) National Internet Registry (NIR):

Since March 2012, NIXI has been running the National Internet Registry (NIR) as Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers (IRINN). IRINN is responsible for allocation of IP addresses and Autonomous System (AS) numbers within the country. As on November 30, 2022 over 4,440 affiliates have joined IRINN.

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