Interim report June 2001


Background

In Uganda, the majority of Internet traffic is presently routed internationally, mostly via the US and Europe over independent satellite links owned and operated separately by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This local traffic is using up precious international bandwidth.

Aside from the frequent breakdowns of ISP’s satellite uplinks, the problem of internationally routed local traffic has been one of the Internet community's biggest headaches.

Internet users in Uganda have had to suffer with email from one ISPs customer taking minutes, even hours, to get to another ISPs customer.

Web sites hosted locally are painfully slow loading due to the fact that the traffic has to go out over international links and then back into the country again to get from one ISP to another.

With the more than ten ISPs, this has meant that the entire local Internet community has had to suffer from these headaches.

The Uganda Internet Exchange Point (UIXP) is perhaps the best hope for the future of the Internet in Uganda.

Now in the early phases of planning, the proposed UIXP is exploring means to have a neutral meeting point for peering among ISPs.
Necessity for a Local Traffic Exchange Long before this discussion about the IXP started, the key item on the agenda has been is effort to address the long standing problem of e-mail and web traffic from one ISP to another going out over international links and being exchanged overseas, sometimes traversing two or more continents to get to a correspondent across the street. The solution to this problem has come in the form of our present effort to establish a Uganda Internet Exchange Point (UIXP).

With the present situation, where all traffic, local and international has to be routed over individual ISP satellite circuits, the cost of each of individual Internet circuit is vastly higher than that of a local link, ISPs are paying dearly for local traffic that is using their international links (between 100-200 Megabits a day).

Uganda Communication Commission Guidelines

The Uganda Communication Commission has issued guidelines under which an IXP peering arrangement may operate. The full text of this is available on the UIXP website (http://www.uixp.co.ug/ucc.guidelines)