Operational plans will be drawn up and submitted to IXP Members for approval.

Operational plans and connection agreements will include:

Quality of Service guarantees
Traffic routing rules
Backup routes
Traffic accounting
Web hosting
Cache control
Security (both physical and network)

Administrative responsibilities of the UIXP will include the regular reporting of statistics, based on the metering of bandwidth. Carriers and ISPs will then be able to study, control daily rate of traffic into and out of Uganda, and thus judge the efficacy of the UIXP. The UIXP should be technically scalable.

UIXP management and technical staff will need to develop a good working relationship with each other, so that technical staff will be answerable to management in using their superior technical abilities to fulfill their mandate to optimize the routing of local traffic.

The UIXP will also serve as a contingency for providing connectivity to an ISP when its own link(s) goes down, benefiting from local traffic being routed (and metered) via the UIXP. Optimizing the local bandwidth will also be a part of the UIXP’s operations.

At the appropriate time, after operational guidelines have been drawn up, and when a reasonable level of consensus has been reached among the stakeholders, consensus will be announced in the national newspapers.

Dialogue among stakeholders is an ongoing process. Preliminary consensus has been reached to have a legal entity registered and operational guidelines drawn up.

Stakeholders have organized a series of round table discussions to orient on the importance of concept, gather empirical data and write up business case.

In the interim, the regulator, Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), has come out with some policy guidelines, schedules and terms under which it would support this effort.

Prior to UCC’s announcement, efforts were underway among content developers, trainers, development agencies and solution providers to setup a non-for-profit enterprise that will establish and will operate an IXP.

Key Beneficiaries

The following are noteworthy benefits of having an IXP: