Project Title:
Establishment of Nepal Internet Exchange

Project Reference no.: 0202A6_SL81

Submitted by:
Nepal Internet Exchange
npIX Project.
Nepal.

Project Report prepared by:

Mr.Rupesh Shrestha
Mr. Ritesh Raj Joshi
Mr. Gaurab Upadhyaya.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. Preview
2. Objectives of npIX
3. Important Research Benefits.
4. Contribution of the Project in Development.
5. Project Management
6. Initial decision problem.
7. Technical issues on static Vs Dynamic routings.
8. Conclusion.

Preview:

A need was deemed for setup of a common Exchange Facility, which should route the local Internet traffic locally through this interconnectivity setup. Direct peer to peer connectivity between very few ISP was not efficiently run and often was cause of a problem rather than solution. With the concept of setting up the npIX, this requirement would be addressed efficiently. The npIX working group hence planned carefully to implement this Exchange facility. npIX Board was also setup with ISPAN General Secretary as Chairman, Representative from peering partners, Representative from Computer Association of Nepal, Representative of npIX building Owner ISP and Co-ordinator for npIX were appointed. The exchange started with routing the traffic using cisco router and cisco switch using static routing between the participating ISPs. There were many hurdles encountered for establishment, which will be explained later. However the exchange participation grew one after another ISPs as an when communication with the exchange was possible to be established. Once major ISPs joined the npIX, they were informed to apply for their own Autonomous System (AS) numbers from APNIC and once that was done the exchange routing was done using BGP (OSPF) implementation. Now, the ISPs directly connecting to npIX and the downstream ISPs of those major ISPs are routing their local traffic locally without using the International bandwidth and with much faster and efficient speed. The increase in speed with the local content has generated more interest among the Internet users to utilize the Internet and Internet based applications.

Objectives of npIX:

1. To provide efficient interconnectivity within Nepal for the Internet (core activity)

2. To promote the interests of its members (non-core activity)

Nepal Internet Exchange (npIX ) is a Layer 2 peering facility, located in Kathmandu. Through a joint collaborative effort of Internet Service Providers associated with ISP Association of Nepal (ISPAN), Packet Clearing House (PCH) and Computer Association of Nepal this project was started. A joint working group was formed to setup, operate and maintain the npIX.

With the core objective of providing efficient interconnectivity within Nepal, npIX has been setup and working group has continuously been involved in their role of new and better suggestions and brainstorming for the improvement of this. The steps taken for improvements has been explained later in this document. The project has achieved its objective and is already actively working for more improvements and expansion of this interconnection to greater mass by enrolling more ISPs, Universities, educational institutes and corporate networks.

The involvement of all the member ISPs in the working group and their continuous participation is the proof of greater interest among the members and their co-operation.

Apart from these objectives, the exchange was very helpful in few other activities, it was able to provide immediate transit service when International Gateway of one ISP was having problem. That has helped trust in the exchange for ISPs and provide better service for the customers.

Similarly, School leaving Certificate (SLC) Exam results are one of the major career point for students. It is the exam for students after Tenth Standard taken centrally by Government of Nepal, Ministry of Education and is considered as Iron Gate exam. The result was announced on 15th June, 2003 at around 5am in the morning. Students knowing the result will be out next morning were eagerly anticipating the result and logging to the Ministry's Department of Education Website since the preceeding night. When the results were out in the morning there was huge traffic movement towards the ISP hosting the site. There was about 6MB traffic from 4ISP towards the ISP hosting the website. This npIX has been successful in providing faster, stable and dependable communication media to users.

Important Research Benefits:

1. ISP members were able to know their local traffic volume to and from their ISP.
2. Traffic routing within the Exchange with better technology.
3. Enhanced technical knowledge to the member ISP's technical personals.
4. Internet Communication was developed to provide better, efficient, stable and faster service to users.

Based on traffic volume to and from the ISP, each ISPs can now put up their communication media capacity and focus on its reliability. ISPs will more focus on local content development and hosting it in their servers hence developing more opportunities for information content availability within the country. Now npIX will work on making the traffic analysis chart for each ISPs to analyze its traffic to and from each ISP on individual analysis basis. MRTG traffic graphs will be developed for each ISP to compare its traffic with each of the other ISPs. This will provide them with Information system for their business decisions.

Technical trainings conducted were very helpful in generating the awareness within the technical people and they in turn will train others within their organization. It is important for the project to have their members know what they can technically achieve with the exchange and do not mess their system hence creating problems for others too.

Contribution of the Project in development :

The project has addressed the problems associated with local traffic routing within the country. The formation of the local Internet Exchange has facilitated this exchange of local traffic. This has benefited the ISPs directly through preservation of bandwidth, and has benefited users with faster downloads. The exchange has also been able to provide a "looking glass" facility for research to ascertain the size of internet infrastructure in Nepal.

As a side effect, the establishment of the exchange has also promoted dialogue at technical level between service providers, which is increasingly more be important in maintaining the data infrastructure of the country against increasing threats in the form of cyber attacks.

On the development side, The IX will be an ideal location for hosting of local content servers. The high speed local access to content hosted locally, will enable NGOs and development agencies, who henceforth were paying for expensive hosting solutions to be able to host locally in Nepal and reach their beneficiaries in a faster and better way.

Historically, elsewhere in the world, IXes has been instrumental in increasing the local content industry. The npIX has started Internet communication development effort in Nepal and hence will make Internet more popular. It has and will help generate more local content for local users to help them easy and faster access to information thereby indirectly helping National growth.

With the introduction of npIX project, ISPs have been able to separate international traffic and local traffic. This enabled them not only to provide better download speed for local contents but also to better position themselves on costwise by roughly 10%. With this discount the market size of Internet users is also increasing daily. With this growth users will be more comfortable to log in to the Internet for their works.

With its expansion and growth, npIX will soon be established nationwide to help easy access to people geographically separated within Nepal to communicate in easy and cheaper medium.

The government of Nepal, has formulated a policy of establishing 1500 tele-centers in Nepal in the next 5 years. The content being developed for the tele-centers can now be accessed at the same speed from all ISPs, thereby encouraging a stable public-private partnership in the service delivery envisioned in the tele-center project.

The development community in Nepal, finally also have a reliable friend in the form of IX -in provisioning their service delivery models in an in-expensive way.

Project Working group and npIX board:

As explained a working group consisting of experts and interested participants was formed and used to have frequent communication via a mailing list addressed wg@npix.net.np
The working group consisted of:
Mr. Rupesh Shrestha-Infocom Pvt. Ltd.
Mr. Ritesh Raj Joshi - Mercantile Communications
Mr. Dileep Agarwal -Worldlink Communications.
Mr. Ajit Shah - Everest Net Pvt. Ltd.
Mr. Binay Bohara - Vianet Communications.
Mr. Gaurab Upadhyaya -Coordinator, npIX
Mr. Bill Woodcock - Packet Clearing House, USA.
Mr. Philip Smith - Cisco Systems, Australia.
Mr. Bill Manning - EP.np
Mr. Brian Longwe - ISP Kenya Ltd.

Lot of communications on carefully designed and planned activities were discussed in the mailing list. Based on the working group suggestions, npIX board took decisions to formulate Policies for npIX. Now npIX has been successfully setup and is working flawlessly. The board members consists of:

Mr. Rupesh Shrestha-Chaiman, General Secretary, ISP Association of Nepal.
Mr. Gaurab Upadhyaya- Co-ordinator
Mr. Dileep Agarawal - representative from peering partners.
Mr. Ajit Shah - House owner of npIX
Mr. Biplav Man Singh, Computer Association of Nepal
To Be nominated, His Majesty's Government

Initial hurdles encountered in the project:

1. Selection of Location: Selecting a location which is both easy to access by radio link with good line of sight and easy to get wire connection from majority of ISPs.
Wire connection was particularly difficult to have due to Nepal Telecommunications Corporation (NTC) being government owned telecom operator and having Monopoly in Telecom services in Nepal was reluctant to provide connectivity to ISPs. The government bureucracy was unable to understand the benefit that would cater to general public with this project. Hence with much difficulty, onsite demonstration and briefing of the project was done to major office rank holders of NTC. ISPs have to put in their effort to explain at each level to establish their individual links to the exchange.
The working group settled on HB Complex, located in southern side of Kathmandu at Ekantakuna as an ideal location. It meet all the criteries set by the working group. In addition, the building was being constructed when the project started, and thus we were able to request the building owners to put in necessary riser space and lining.

2. Technology to start the project with: Deciding on whether to start the npIX with BGP implementation itself or to start with Static routing which could be implemented immediately and then change to BGP after ISPs are well equipped technically.
This decision was vital and after some discussions among working group, it was decided to implement static routing initially to kickstart npIX and then BGP trainings were conducted to give confidence to ISPs. This has ensured proper handling of BGP/OSPF transition and each ISP now can independently manage their dynamic routes.
On the hardware side, Packet Clearing House (PCH), donated the necessary basic equipment consisting of a Cisco Layer 2 swtich, two route servers and a data collection host. PCH also conducted first orientation training.

3. Finalizing the pricing structure. Pricing Structure was finalized after lot of discussions within working group and was decided with common agreement among local ISPs. The Monthly charge figure was finalized based on locally payable amount by ISPs. The amount was neither too high nor too low and was enough to sustain the IX as well. A single fixed pricing structure was selected to have equality among all ISPs as the model is based on non-profit operation. This necessitates a minimum contribution from partners, and the fees were set unanimously to be low enough but at the same time be able to sustain the IX.

Technical issues on Static Vs. Dynamic Routings:

Almost all ISPs in Nepal were using static routing in their respective IP networks. This created serious constraints in network management as the route additions and modifications had to be entered manually on all routers starting from the gateway router to the destination router. This was a time consuming task and not a practical methodology on large IP networks. Moreover, static routing does not provide automatic failover if the network link goes down. Hence there was a great need for ISPs to implement dynamic routing in their networks in order to make network management tasks simpler and have provision for automatic failovers during downtimes.

The ISPs started peering at npIX using static routes that was as stated above is not the recommended way to peer. In an event the IX switch failed all the peers have to manually re-route all peer traffic back from their internet gateway. This was seen as an undesired action as the downtime could occur at any time of the day. From the start, ISPs wanted to use dynamic routing but as ISPs did not have expertise to carry out the change in their critical networks, we seeked external help from Dr. Philip Smith, Cisco Systems. He visited Kathmandu and helped us with the migration and also conduct a workshop to network engineers from the
ISPs. During his visit, all ISPs were successfully migrated to dynamic routing with OSPF and BGP. We now have an ideal IP networks at the core as well as at the IX.

The IX operation has been very stable since the migration to dynamic routing. If one of the peers or the IX fails, all the peer traffic is now automatically routed via the Internet gateway of the respective ISP.

As technical support, EP.net which is run by Mr. Bill Manning provided the necessary IP address space required for the IX. The IP address are being provided for free for the first three years of the IX and would require payment after that.

Dr. Philip Smith and Cisco systems has also promised help and support in future as more ISPs join the IX.

Diagrammatic representation of the npIX:

Currently Participating ISPs

Mercantile Communications
WorldLink Communications
Infocom Pvt. Ltd.
Vianet Communications
Everest Net Pvt. Ltd
CCSL Pvt. Ltd.

HTP, HONS are two other ISPs who participate through their up streams.

Problems

There are still major problems. The major problem is to do with the telecommunications company. The company has yet to provide telecommunications circuit to the IX for all participants. They have also not provided circuits to other interested parties. This is being in constant dialogue and will be resolved in time to come.

Conclusion:

Though this is just an interim report, this project has accomplished most of the important activities and is already running successfully. Now, little further research needs to be done technically to further enhance the full implementation. The complete report will be prepared and submitted after completing the project by November-December, 2003.

The Final report will constitute of complete project overview, its contributions, pattern of growth, Interviews of participants of the project and Financial expenses and contribution breakdowns.

NpIX has been a successful project and has provided instant benefit for ISPs, Internet users, Government. This project can be easily replicated to be used in other countries and lessons learnt during the project and researches were very valuable and can be shared with other new projects to be implemented.

Read the Abstract of Project
Read the Project Proposal