By Russell Williams

There is a push to implement national Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in our islands, and this has sparked a lot of a debate as to the need and whether their formation would drive down internet costs.

To give some background as to the challenges as they are now; if we use the scenario of customer A who uses Internet Service Provider (ISP) A and customer B who uses ISP B, when email or Voice Over IP (VOIP) is sent between the two customers, the traffic leaves the island, goes to the USA and comes back. Clearly this is a waste of resources.

Having a national/local IXP the two ISPs would connect at the IXP and exchange their data there and not in the USA. This is a much more desirable situation, and should offer the two users a better experience.

It is this whole prospect of improved quality of service that has not been a topic of discussion. In my opinion, if the premise is that Internet access is essential there should be some serious effort to ensuring that ISPs meet certain levels of ‘Quality of Service’ and reliability; and not simply rolling out access everywhere through a flaky and unreliable network. Those of us in St.Kitts-Nevis have already suffered from a poorly managed mobile network by the DOMINANT provider, and we would not want to repeat the experience with Internet.

Since in many cases the very minimal cost of setting up and maintaining an IXP are borne by the ISPs there are few financial reasons not to create IXPs. If we adopt the old attitude that the content being consumed and downloaded is North American and a negligible amount is local or Caribbean and so we shouldn’t do it, then we are doomed to maintain the status quo.

Africa's Internet Points

But if we are forward thinking and realise that with common applications such as Skype local people can offer one to one tutoring to other nationals, using video as well as voice, then the picture and possibilities change.

Additionally, some commentators rightly point out that there is a lot of Caribbean content from folks throughout the region on Facebook and Youtube. It just resides on servers in the USA. The presence of IXPs in the region gives rise to the possibility of Facebook and Youtube placing servers in the region to meet the demand for that content regionally. This would further improve the user experience and potentially bring in revenue and skills to the region, since these servers would at least be located and powered here.

Another compelling reason for IXPs is that that they would provide an opportunity for us to gain independent statistics of our Internet usage. You will note that I mentioned that the assumption is that most of the content being downloaded/consumed is North American and not Caribbean in origin, but there is presently no way of knowing that for sure. Regional IXPs provide an opportunity to gather essential facts pertaining to Internet use.

There is also the little discussed topic of National Security. Presently, an email sent to or by government officials at the gov.kn domain to say a customer of The Cable goes to the USA and therefore becomes subject to USA laws and can be stored and its contents scanned! Now consider emails being exchanged by civil servants and government officials to their counterparts/colleagues in the region or regional agencies such as CARICOM, OECS, CDB etc. without a network of IXPs in the region these emails are all sent through the USA.

So when discussing the merits of IXPs in the region we need to look beyond the price reduction argument and whether there is sufficient local/regional content of traffic to justify it.

Image Courtesy White African.com

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