What is National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI)?

• The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) celebrated its 23rd foundation day on June 19.

• Four new digital initiatives were launched on the occasion.

• These included the IX portal, myIRINN portal, .in auction portal, and an AI-powered WHOIS Screening Platform. 

• The portals are aimed at enhancing user experience, improving operational efficiency, bringing transparency and strengthening monitoring and verification processes across India's internet ecosystem. 

• The AI-powered WHOIS screening platform will help enhance domain name security and strengthen the detection of suspicious websites hence strengthening India’s .in domain space.

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 78 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 39 lakh ‘.in’ domain names have been registered. 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 4,629 affiliates have joined IRINN. NIXI has delegated over 15.58 billion Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) and over 10.63 million IPv4 addresses.