As the internet withstands an increase in traffic in India from people working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, we spoke to Raunak Maheshwari, who runs the Extreme Internet Exchange, for an idea on how ready exchanges and the Indian internet are to handle the surge in traffic. Note that this conversation happened on March 23 — we seem to be have a stability in web traffic after it initially surged at the beginning of last week. Extreme IX is a private internet exchange, one among several that directly connects content providers like Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Google and Akamai to Internet Service Providers. Edited excerpts from the interview: MediaNama: Is your exchange capable of dealing with increased video bitrates even if content providers don't do anything to reduce their data use? Would you be able to handle data use doubling? Raunak Maheshwari: Yeah. On our infrastructure, we can manage [the surge in traffic]. That is not an issue. But ISPs bring their own infra to the exchange. They either bring their own fiber or buy point-to-point links from some telco, and reach the exchange. So we are not the ones manning the connection from the exchange to the ISP, the ISPs themselves are responsible for it. We just provide ports on our switches. As long as we have switches with ports, we can provide our services. The dependence on my infra is very small; the dependence on telcos' infra and ISPs' last mile and their connection to my exchange…
