The Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN), a non-for-profit and membership-based organisation, which provides a platform where networks interconnect directly within Nigeria has highlighted the benefits that come with collaboration among operators, peering in carrier and cloud-neutral data centres and the hosting of content locally in Nigeria, where it is believed does more downloads of content than uploads.
The Chief Executive Officer of IXPN, Mr. Muhammed Rudman highlighted these benefits to stakeholders at an exclusive peering workshop, which was organized by IXPN and Africa Data Centres (ADC) in collaboration with Workonline Communications.
According to Muhammed, there is a lack of collaboration between the various operators in the ecosystem, which has led to duplication of infrastructure and ultimately, high cost of services for the end-users.
“There is a lot of fragmentation in the industry. Despite the Nigerian Communications Commission’s framework for infrastructure sharing, industry players do not collaborate that is why we have duplication of infrastructure which are supposed to be shared,” he told Journalists on the sideline of the forum.
He noted that if industry players collaborate, it will bring down operational costs and capital expenditure.
Speaking on what peering in a carrier and cloud-neutral data centres will bring to the industry and the Nigerian economy in general, Mr. Muhammed who is the immediate past President of the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA), said peering between Internet Exchange Point and a carrier/cloud-neutral data centres will enhance connections for citizens and organisations alike, and help the economy to thrive.
“Peering through internet exchanges addresses the challenges of traffic by ensuring the shortest possible route is used to reach a given destination. It keeps traffic as local as possible, which improves performance and enables faster connections between networks, facilitating high-speed data transfer, lower latency, increased bandwidth and improved fault tolerance,” he said.
According to him, local hosting of content is a driver for economic growth, stressing that money paid to foreign hosting companies constitutes capital flight, puts more strain on Nigeria’s foreign earnings and slows the growth of local data centers and delays the development of new ones.
He also explained that hosting locally provides additional revenue opportunities to local ISPs and data centers which in turn creates more job and technical competencies. “Local content hosted abroad has higher latency than if hosted locally – over 1000%. But hosting it locally in any of the data centres has a direct and indirect impact on the economy – Job Creation, Tax, a platform for other IT professionals,” he argued.
The implications for businesses who hosted their content abroad are numerous; it affects business continuity, it comes with lower support level and poor update cycles because of conflicting working hours/ this is even as a study shows that a second-long delay causes a 7% drop in conversions, an 11% drop in page views and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction.
Meanwhile, as a way of addressing some of the challenges in the ecosystem, IXPN had organized a free Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) training for network engineers across Nigeria as part of her planned capacity-building programme for its increasing members and commitment towards improving the internet ecosystem in the country.
The training was held at the organisation’s corporate headquarter in Lagos, where Muhammed Rudamn explained that Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a gateway protocol that enables the internet to exchange routing information between autonomous systems (AS).
“We want to empower members of the Internet eXchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) with the rudiments and workings of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is important to us as a one-stop peering point for service and content providers,” he emphasized.