THE INTERNET EXCHANGE POINT OF NIGERIA

28th January, 2020

Muhammed Rudmanm.rudman@ixp.net.ngwww.ixp.net.ng

Eko-Konnect Conference

Role of Internet Exchange in Research & Education Network

A GLANCE AT HISTORY OF THE INTERNET/IXPS

§ ARPANET developed by DARPA§ The first ARPANET link was established

between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969 . The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians.

§ Network Access Points (NAPs) established at end of NSFnet§ The original “exchange points”

§ The early internet runs on the telephone infrastructure

ABOUT IXPN

§ WSIS summit in Tunisia 2005

§ The president directed FMIC to establish an IXP in Nigeria

§ NCC called a stakeholders forum in February 2006

§ ISPAN chaired the implementation committee

§ Internet eXchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) LTD GTE is a not-for-profit and neutral organization

§ NCC inaugurates an interim board in March 2007

The Role of IXPN

Keeping Nigerian Internet traffic local

Reduces costs for access to local

content

Enhance local connectivity and improve internet experience of end

users

Promote and encourage the

creation of local content

Build technical skills and capacity

Act as an efficient centralized service

launch point

BENEFITS OF IXPS TO

NIGERIA

Ø SAVES MONEY!!!

Traffic going overseas means transit charges paid to upstream ISP

Ø Reduces foreign exchange / capital flight

Money stays in local economy

Used to provide better local infrastructure and services for customers

Ø Customers pay less for Internet access

Therefore more customers sign up, better business for ISPs

Ø Enhance local connectivity and improve internet experience of end usersCustomers use the Internet for more products, services, and activities

Ø New revenue opportunity

IXPs have considerable multiplier effect on the economy by enabling Applications – Local hosting, E-Commerce, E- Government , Distance Education

LOCAL TRAFFIC

ROUTING BEFORE &

AFTER IXPN

IXPN’s IMPACT ON LOCAL TRAFFIC – 10,000% Increase in 5 years and localizing 50% of Internet

traffic by connected ISPs.

Sudden jump in traffic after the connection of a major content provider to IXPN.

June 2012

March 2011July 2008

July 2019

IXPN’S IMPACT ON

BANDWIDTH COST

0

2

4

6

8

Category 1

Transit IXPN

Paying $1,000 for a 10GE Port50 % port utilization$1,000 divide by 5,000Mbps= 0.2 USD (72 Naira) average cost per Mbps

5000Mbps x $8 =$40,000 transit cost without IXPNSavings Monthly by passing traffic via IXPN$40,000 - $1,000 = $39,000 (14 Million Naira)

* Exchange Rate 1USD= N360

Analysis of savings to a particular member:

REGIONAL IXPS WOULD PROMOTE LOCALIZATION OF TRAFFIC IN EACH ZONE AND MOREEFFICIENT WAY OF

EXCHANGING TRAFFIC ACROSS THE

COUNTRY.

WHY WE HAD TO HAVE AN IXP IN EACH

GEOPOLITICAL ZONE

National PortionInternational Portion

$

$

$$$Internet

Kano

Lagos

Dropping average cost per MBPS through Economy of scale:DS3 =45Mbps - Average cost per Mbps N79,000 ($220)STM1 = 155 Mbps - Average cost per Mbps N37,000 ($103)STM4 = 620 Mbps – Average cost per Mbps N12,000 ($33)STM64 = 10 Gbps – Average cost per Mbps N1,800 ($5)

Some of the reasons why fiber is so expensive between states -High Cost of Fiber Backhaul:§ Right of way – very expensive§ Fiber cut due sabotage § Low demand- service to only premium clients § Local community issues – Omonile J (Area boys)

AFFORDABLE INTERNET TO RESEARCH EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

Lagos Kano

IXPNIXPN

MORE ON IXPN• 62 Members and counting…• 4 PoP (Point of Presence) in Lagos:

ICNL, Medallion, Rack Centre and MDX.• 10Gbps Backbone fibre link between

PoPs. Upgrade to 40Gbps in progress.• Additional PoPs in 4 different cities:

Abuja, Port Harcourt, Kano & Enugu.• 150 Gbps peak aggregate traffic.

IXPNInterconnecting

Networks

Internet

Servic

e Pro

vider

s

Car

rier

s

Telcos

Critical Internet Resources

Financial Institutions

Content providers

Higher Educational Institutions

The Internet statistics -ESTIMATES

There are over 4.4 billion internet users worldwide out of the 7.7 Billion.

About 351 million registered domain at June 2019.

2.41 billion monthly active users at the end of June 2019. On average more than 350 million photos uploaded to Facebook per day in 2017. 10 billion Facebook messages are sent each day.

5 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every second -300 hours a minute, a decade every 5 hours and a century every 2 days- (more video uploaded in 1 day than NTA broadcasted in the past 40 years – assuming it runs 24/7).

Source: § https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/§ www.wikipedia.org§ https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/press/

Market Capitalizationq Microsoft - $1,061q Amazon - $858 billionq Google - $838 billion

Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization

With the awesome growth of the internet content : where does

Nigeria stand ?

SOME KEY TERMS

Eyeball Network –Access Network/Transit Provider/ISP

Content Network

Content Delivery/Distribution Network (CDN)

DATA CENTER FOOTPRINT OF THE THREE LARGEST CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE PROVIDERS

§ Africa§ 1.3 Billion population § 17% of the global population§ Over 500 million people online§ less than 1% of global public cloud

services revenue was generated in the continent.

Amazon Web Services

Google Cloud Services

Microsoft Azure Services

LOCATION OF AFRINIC IPSUSED FOR HOSTING

§ Source: Cloudflare and TeleGeography

§ https://blog.cloudflare.com/african-traffic-growth-and-predictions-for-the-future/

InternetUndersea cable

Landing Station-Nigerian Tier1 ISP

Tier2Telco’s/ISP POP

Tier3Telco’s/ISP POP

End Users

Internet distribution

National PortionInternational Portion

Global CarrierTier 1

$0.1 -1 $4 -10 $6-20

$30-$50

Increase in cost of IP at various point towards the Nigerian end users

WHY WE PAY MORE FOR INTERNET

Cost increases as you move further away from the content

IP Transit cost Based on 155Mbps

LOCAL HOSTING AS A DRIVER FOR ECONOMIC GROWTH

$

$

$

$$$eContent

International National

Eye balls

Nigeria is a net “Importer” of bandwidth. i.e More DOWNLOADS than UPLOADS

IMPLICATIONS OF OVERSEAS

DATA HOSTING

Economic

End Users

SecurityBusiness

Legal

ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS

• Money paid to foreign hosting companies constitute capital flight.

• It put more strain on our foreign earnings

• It slows the growth of local data centers and delay development of new ones.

• Hosting locally provides additional revenue opportunities to local ISPs and data centers which in turn creates more job and technical competencies.

• Data centers have direct and indirect impact on the economy – Job Creation, Tax , platform for other IT professionals.

IMPLICATION TO END USERS

• Local content hosted abroad has higher latency than if hosted locally – over 1000%

• This makes data access (browsing) slow with poor quality of service.

• Internet becomes more expensive due to the distance, hence end users pay more.

• They take less capacity due to the high cost and hence cannot make good use of it.

• The process of making payment for data hosting becomes a hassle – due to the need to pay in USD.

SECURITY IMPLICATIONS

• Internet traffic leaving the shores of our country means that our supposedly local communications is susceptible to eavesdropping (espionage), denial of service etc.

• It is also at the risk of man-in-middle attacks or service traffic hijacking.

• Owners of data can not usually validate state of the physical infrastructure (data centers) hosting their data.

LEGAL IMPLICATIONS

� Compliance to data storage regulations of the country where the data physically resides. This means that the country have access to your data when necessary.- Safe Harbor Laws

� In case of data theft or alteration it would be difficult and expensive to institute an action in court against the hosting company – These are hidden cost not often considered by businesses when hosting data abroad.

� Lack of consistency in data laws across jurisdictions makes continued compliance of foreign laws particularly difficult to follow.

� A survey conducted by Akamai and Gomez.com shows that half of the Internet users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded in 3 seconds.

� 79% of web shoppers who face any difficulty in a site’s shopping experience say that they won’t return to the site to buy again. And half of them will tell their friends about the unpleasant shopping experience. That’s bad press for your business.

� TagMan’s 2012 study show that a second-long delay causes a 7% drop in conversions, an 11% drop in page views and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction.

BUSINESS IMPLICATION

� Affect business continuity: - Outage on submarine cables seriously affect businesses that rely on their online data hosted abroad.

� Lower support level: - Dealing with an overseas hosting provider can often subject your business to lengthy time differences and restrict your support levels to that country’s business hours. Being unable to access support when you need it can put your online business at severe risk.

� Update Cycles: - Conflicting working hours can affect more than just your support levels. Overseas hosting companies often run updates at times that best suit their local customers, but might represent your heaviest period of site traffic. This can cause your website to become slow, sluggish or even crash during hours where it could be generating profits.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers strategically located in different parts of the world. Each server holds a copy of a website’s content (files, images, scripts, etc.) and serves it to the site visitors within its locale.

� Worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure will more than double over the 2019-2023 forecast period, according to the latest update to the International Data Corporation. With a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.3%, public cloud spending will grow from $229 billion in 2019 to nearly $500 billion in 2023.GLOBAL CLOUD

COMPUTING MARKET

TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURE REQUIRED TO SUPPORT LOCAL CONTENT HOSTING

ASN ALLOCATION BY COUNTRY SOURCE: AFRINIC.NET - 2019

Total ASNs assigned by each RIR Source: NRO.net - 2019

INTERNET IN NIGERIAu Total ASNs allocated by AfriNIC – 181

u 143 active networks

u 83% of internet traffic is mobile

u Nigeria account for 23% of total African internet users

u 122 Million internet users – 7th in the world

u 33% are on Broadband

u Five major submarine cable system

u SAT3

u Glo1

u MainOne

u WASC (West African Cable System)

u ACE (African Cost to Europe)

u Others on the way

FUTURE PLANS

§ Push for more connection of IXPs from other African countries into IXPN.

§ Establish addition exchange point to ensure that 6 geopolitical zones are covered – North East remaining.

§ Creation of aggregation points in other states and connecting them to the regional IXPs.

§ Trainings/Capacity building BGP and best practice on Peering/Interconnection.

§ Connection of Higher Educational Institutions into the exchange points to complement the National Research and Educational Network (NGREN).

§ Attracting more content providers into the country.

THANK YOU. Questions