National internet exchange of India (NIXI) is all set to don the role of the national internet registry (NIR) for India.

As the regional internet registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region, Asia Pacific network information centre (APNIC) is responsible for the allocation and management of internet resources, including IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, across the region. APNIC has already given the in-principle approval to nixi.

With this, nixi would be handling all the internet protocol (IP) addresses across India. The IPs is a number-based address system to identify and locate devices and facilitates data flow between them.

“Apart from IPs becoming cheaper, it will also help cyber crime sleuths fasten their investigation”, said, NIXI’s system analyst, Rajiv Kumar. He said, there would be no request to APNIC regarding IP related queries. Even the waiting time due to the time zone difference between India and Australia, would reduce as it would be handled locally. nixi is a not-for-profit company that implement policies set by the ministry of communications and information technology, department of information technology.

Nixi would provide IP address allocation and related services in India, in accordance with APNIC regional and global policies. Internet service providers (ISPs) in India would be able to choose either NIXI or APNIC, as their preferred registry to obtain IP addresses. Nixi would be also be given the mandate of internationalised domain names (IDNs) for Indian languages. IDNs are the second and third level domain names or web address, represented by local language characters. India is planning to get domains names in all the Indian languages. “Already Internet Corporation for assigned names and numbers (ICANN) has approved IDNs for 11 Indian languages to be handled by NIXI”, said Centre for Development of Advanced Computing’s (CDAC) associate director, Mahesh D Kulkarni. CDAC is the technological partner for NIXI. “In 2005, there were only 6000 registrants (end users) for .IN. Now there are more than a million end users for .IN across the world”, said Rajiv Kumar.

Explaining the irony that about 40 per cent of .IN ccTLDs being registered abroad, even though .IN stands for India, Montage Infotech ED, Anguluri Venkat, said, “Companies get better service and infrastructural support than what Indian registrars (re-sellers) can provide”.