Why Internet Exchange Points Are Important for a Developing Country Like India

Owing to the unprecedented times, India underwent a strict nation-wide lockdown. The inability of free-flow of movement suddenly forced people to resort to the Internet for collaboration for work, education and entertainment. This resulted in a sudden spike in internet traffic due to an increase in data consumption leading to the problem of bandwidth inefficiency. This unforeseen rise in consumption posed a grave challenge for the Indian telecom sector as their infrastructure wasn’t equipped to handle the situation.

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A recent report by CISCO stated that India would have more than 900 million internet users by 2023, and a parallel study conducted by Ericsson shared that the average smartphone user in June 2020 consumed 25GB of data per month. Despite India being one of the largest content consumers and also making a noticeable contribution in the content creation community, only a fraction of Indian households have proper broadband accessibility and clock an average download speed of 12.07 Mbps.

The introduction and speedy adoption of Internet Exchange Points is one of the more efficient and long-term solutions to address the persistent bandwidth woes, infrastructure-related incompetencies while significantly enhancing customer experience. A fundamental characteristic of Internet Exchange Points (IXP) is to increase broadband speed and reduce lag due to congestion caused by numerous data links. These IXPs enable direct access to content providers like Netflix, Google, Amazon to India’s leading internet service providers, thus reducing latency by multi-folds. Players like Extreme IX offload Internet traffic from expensive upstream to peering, which makes the network less congested and affordable for ISPs resulting in cheaper wireline broadband plans for the consumers. IXPs also help solve data traffic congestion issues.