We missed this earlier: The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) is now open to peering with content providers like Google, Amazon Web Services, Akamai and Netflix (h/t Gurshabad Grover), the exchange announced last October. This is significant, since NIXI, which was set up by the government in 2003, has so far only allowed ISPs to peer with each other through it, and did not permit content providers to peer directly with NIXI. Not permitting content providers is highly unusual for an internet exchange — in 2012, Anurag Bhatia pointed out how NIXI had total traffic of around 20Gbps while European exchanges were already transporting terabits per second since they had relationships with content providers (and more specifically, content delivery networks, or CDNs). NIXI currently has daily traffic of around 160Gbps. Too late? NIXI may have come out with these policy changes too late. Content providers, while locked out of NIXI, had to find a way to reach internet users, without having to directly negotiate peering arrangements with individual telcos. In the last decade, private internet exchanges like Extreme-IX and DE-CIX have rapidly taken over, letting content providers bypass NIXI by connecting them to ISPs with competitive pricing. NIXI's total traffic in India today is a fraction of what these new exchanges support every day. DE-CIX and Extreme-IX each have over four times more daily traffic than NIXI, enabling 700Gbps of data to flow each day. After the COVID-19 shutdown in India started, private exchanges shouldered a tremendous portion of…
