Grenada, British Virgin Islands launch internet exchange points

Grenada and the British Virgin Islands (BVI) have become the first English-speaking Caribbean countries to establish an internet exchange point (IXP). Grenada launched on May 17, John Gilchrist, an ICT specialist with the National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (NTRC) in Grenada told BNamericas. According to the official, the launch has been only partial because legal representatives of the country's two main operators - Cable & Wireless Communications ( C&WC), which goes under the brand name LIME, and Flow, of Columbus Communications - are still poring over the fine print of an agreement that will set up a central body to manage the IXP. In the case of the BVI, the IXP was officially launched on June 2 but had been operating temporarily for three weeks on a test switch prior to that to make sure there were no interruptions to connectivity, a spokesperson for the BVI's Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) told BNamericas. The initial participants in the BVI's IXP are the telcos LIME and CCT Global Communications. In a statement on the BVI's government website, the acting permanent secretary in the communications and works ministry, Arlene Smith-Thompson, said: "The territory is now better positioned to take advantage of the benefits this initiative affords, such as increased resiliency of the national network, increased quality of internet services, improved protection of privacy and business secrets, new business opportunities and innovative services and the overall strengthening of the internet and telecommunications infrastructure." The two launches form part of the Caribbean regional IXP initiative, which has been spearheaded by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU) and research institute Packet Clearing House (PCH), who both donated the initial IXP equipment. Gilchrist, of Grenada's NTRC, said that the IXP initative should help bring savings on international traffic costs for ISPs as traffic will remain local and also stimulate the development of local content. "We're looking at benefits like local content development, hosting, development of e-government," Gilchrist said. "The problem we have is that most of our content is hosted outside the region, which entails a lot of transit fees. If we send an email from Grenada to St Lucia, that has to go to Miami and maybe further and then back to St Lucia," he said. "In the future we would like to attract big companies like Google to put servers locally in the Caribbean, which will facilitate an increase in speed and reduce latency especially when looking at things like video streaming," he added. In the non-English speaking Caribbean there are five regional IXPs located in Curaçao, St Maarten, Haiti, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.