The Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN), a core network infrastructure provider company that allows several ISPs, telecommunications companies, carriers, and content providers, to exchange traffic amongst their networks locally, has achieved a major milestone by its elevation to the status of the West African regional Internet Exchange Point.
This means that Nigeria is well on her way to becoming West Africa’s Internet transmission hub.
Speaking to The Guardian, over the weekend, the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of IXPN, Muhammed Rudman, disclosed that the huge stride was made by successfully vying in the Africa Union Commission (AUC)’s African Internet Exchange System (AXIS) project for a Regional Internet Exchange Point (RIXP) for West Africa.
Rudman, who is very optimistic about the huge revenue generation that would accrue to Nigeria immediately other service providers in the region are connected to the country’s exchange point, disclosed that currently, the IXP saves Nigerian telecom operators and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) about $1 million monthly because they now route traffic locally instead of hosting them abroad. The country currently has three IXPs, situated in Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja. He explained that before now, ISPs paid as much as $4000 per megabyte to foreign hubs to route Internet traffic, “but because they have now found the IXPN more reliable and dependable, they route traffic within and pay an average of $100 per megabyte.
Rudman said: “The fact that the regional IXP for West Africa is domiciled in Nigeria should leap-frog the nation to the information hub in the West African sub-region. It will, invariably, boost patronage of complementary and ancillary services in Nigeria from telecom companies, content providers and other IP-centric organisations in the region.
He affirmed that “Becoming the regional IXP holds great prospects for the Nigeria economy. Typically, if the big telecommunications operators and ISPs across the region connect to us, it will make the country the main hub for information communication exchange within the region, which would eventually attract regional and global content providers into the country, and thus translating to more patronage for our data centers.”
The CEO stressed that regional IXP would attract banks, universities and research institutions in West Africa to host their information in Nigeria because of the shorter physical distance between these countries to Nigeria compared to Europe and the United States where they currently host their data.
He did not fail to declare his optimism about the attraction it would hold for many global content providers such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft for whom the task of integrating their network would be made much easier because they would prefer a place where several service providers are interconnected. He projected that they would be in favor of making Nigeria their regional hub, a point from where they can distribute their content to the West African region.