What is National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI)?

• The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) marked the successful completion of one year of its Internet Governance Internship & Capacity Building Scheme (IGICBS) with a commemorative event held in New Delhi on January 19.

• This scheme aims to provide internship opportunities to the internet enthusiasts who are interested to work in the area of internet governance. 

• NIXI aims towards nurturing a pool of domestic talent, who can deep dive and engage themselves on emerging internet governance issues.

• The initiative has emerged as a strong platform connecting policy, technology, and academia through expert-led learning and mentorship. 

• Over the past year, NIXI engaged and trained more than 10,000 participants, strengthening youth participation and India’s role in the global internet governance ecosystem.

What is the purpose of NIXI?

The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), 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. As many as 77 Internet Exchange Nodes are functional across the country. The maximum volume of Internet traffic being handled by NIXI at present is 1.53 Tbps.

2) .IN Registry and Internationalised 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 41 lakh ‘.in’ domain names have been registered till December 2024. Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) in all 22 official languages are launched.

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. Over 4,483 affiliates have joined IRINN.