IXPN strengthens West Africa leadership position with new hosting

As part of its strategic drive to strengthen its West Africa leadership position, the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) is now hosting Verisign’s Regional Internet Resolution (RIR) Site.

The activation of Verisign is coming less than a year after IXPN was elevated to the status of the West African regional Internet Exchange Point. IXPN’s elevation came after successfully vying in the Africa Union Commission’s African Internet Exchange System project for a Regional Internet Exchange Point for West Africa.

The IXPN is a physical infrastructure that allows several Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and network operators to exchange traffic between their networks, generally referred to as autonomous systems.

Speaking on the feat in Lagos, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of IXPN, Muhammed Rudman, said the activation of Verisign’s RIR Site into IXPN physical infrastructure is a pointer to the company’s mission.

This is to become the leading IXP in Africa in the near future and in line with its mission, also provide a national core infrastructure that facilitates internet operations in Nigeria and to localise traffic as well as reduce local internet routing cost.

“We are pleased to announce that IXPN has become Verisign’s Regional Internet Resolution Site (RIR). Verisign is one of the leading companies in the Global DNS industry, they maintain two of the Internet’s 13 Root Domain Name Servers (DNS), they are also the authoritative registry for the .com, .net and other generic Top-Level Domains (TLDs),” Rudman disclosed.

He explained that the Verisign RIR would provide a local Anycast instance of the J-Root Servers as well as the primary DNS for .com and .net TLDs. “The Verisign RIR would improve Internet performance and user experience within Nigeria, by decreasing the transactional latency between our members’ recursive DNS servers to both the J-Root DNS servers and the .com/.net DNS servers,” he assured.

In addition, Rudman said the Verisign RIR would equally reduce dependencies on IP transit relationships for critical DNS reachability, thereby increasing Internet resiliency to DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), Attacks on Root Servers.

Meanwhile, the IXPN has assured that the company would continue with its effort to get more organisations, especially academic institutions in other parts of Nigeria and West Africa to join the IXPN, with the aim of domiciling local Internet content for the benefit of all Internet users within Nigeria and the West African region.

According to Rudman, IXPN’s plan is to boost patronage of complementary and ancillary services in Nigeria from telecom companies, content providers and other IP-centric organisations in the region, stressing that IXPN as a regional IXP holds great prospects for the Nigerian economy.

“We are making efforts to expand our services to other regions in Nigeria. Apart from Lagos, we are also in Port-Harcourt, Abuja, and Kano, and trying to be in Enugu. This will ensure that traffic within those regions remains local as well as promote that region to start hosting content locally,” he said.