Mumbai based Internet Service Provider 7 Star Digital jumped to the top spot of Netflix's ISP Speed Index for India, defeating Airtel, which held on to the #1 position for most of the last year. This boost was driven by 7 Star installing two Netflix caches in its network, 7 Star confirmed to MediaNama. Netflix gives these caches, known as Open Connect Appliances (OCAs), for free to participating Internet providers around the world. Though Netflix does not comment on the number of these caches it has in place, British researchers estimated in a study that Netflix had hundreds of these OCAs around the world last year. "Since we operate in Areas like Juhu, Lokhandwala, and Versova there is huge demand for Netflix content," 7 Star's CTO Vijay Ahire told MediaNama. "We made use of the Netflix Open Connect Program in which we received two nodes which serves content from those nodes based on popularity." Ahire also said that competition with Jio's fiber broadband service, which is starting to roll out to more cities, partly contributed to 7 Star choosing to obtain Netflix caches. On Wednesday, MediaNama reported that Netflix had begun peering directly with the Mumbai Internet Exchange (also known as the Mumbai Convergence Hub), India's second largest Internet exchange. Earlier, we had reported that Netflix had deployed Open Connect Appliances to three large broadband providers in the country. Around this time last year, Netflix had no server presence in India, and served most traffic from overseas locations like Singapore. Halfway into its second…
