Fiji Internet Exchange Point (Fiji-IX)

Fiji-IXP is Live, initially started with four ISP operators but now we have seven members peering to the IXP switch. The seven members are Vodafone Fiji Limited, Digicel Fiji Limited, Telecom Fiji Limited, FINTEL, USP, FNU and WALESI.

Benefits of having an IXP for Fiji

• Route all local traffic through the IX Switch rather than using the expensive transit links which in return saves bandwidth for the operators.
• Quality of service (QOS) have improved as route to reach the local contents is shorter thus providing the consumers an improved domestic connectivity in terms of accessing locals web contents.
• Fiji-IX will enhance ICT development in Fiji as it will attract ICT professionals & developers to develop local contents and host it locally in Fiji as Fiji-IX will provide better network performance in term of accessing local contents.
• ICT is rapidly developing in the Pacific islands and Fiji wants to become an ICT hub for the Pacific islands, Fiji-IX is a framework in promoting Fiji to become an ICT hub.
• Market Development – Fiji IXP will promote local ICT service market development for co-location services (e.g., hosting, cached services, etc.) and services that require high bandwidth and low latency (e.g., real-time and multimedia services).
• Security and Privacy – Keeping local traffic “local” within national boundaries reduces privacy and security risks inherent in sending sensitive data across national borders over multiple hops.

Regional Pacific Exchange Point

The establishment of sub-regional Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) can improve Internet’s affordability, latency and traffic capacity. Papua New Guinea and Fiji established national IXPs in 2017 with assistance from Internet Society, APNIC and other partners. It resulted in a 10% decrease of Internet services price in PNG and Internet latency in Fiji between local operators improving significantly from 60ms to 2ms.
To this effect, a capacity building workshop of the Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway (AP-IS) was held in 2019 to discuss improving Internet traffic management through an IXP. Seven Pacific Island countries expressed interest. Solomon Islands requested the ESCAP secretariat to organize a follow-up capacity building workshop, to exchange ideas on how to operationalize the Pacific IXP proposal. A second capacity building workshop was held in 2020, which was followed by national consultations in the target countries (Fiji, Samoa and New Zealand) to raise awareness of various domestic stakeholders (regulators, national Internet exchanges, telecom operators, and ministries of ICTs) regarding possible options to build the Pacific IXP.
The national consultations found general support from various domestic stakeholders in the target countries towards establishing the Pacific IXP. Samoa requested the ESCAP secretariat and partners to facilitate building consensus and arrangement on establishing of the Pacific IXPs through a memorandum of agreement among key stakeholders in the 3 target countries.