Digital India: Why Evolving Digital Economies Need Evolving Digital Infrastructures

India is one of the fastest-growing and most digitally valuable economies in the world. Therefore, staying technologically ahead of the curve is not only essential for the subcontinent, but also for infrastructure providers present in the region, such as DE-CIX. As the demands for higher bandwidth and lower latency continue to grow, Internet Exchanges (IXs) must evolve to meet these challenges head-on. How the IX of the future secures tomorrow’s digital economic success – not only in India, but around the world.

Whether at the hairdresser’s, in the corner shop, or at the government office – nowhere else in the world do people pay cashlessly as naturally and frequently as they do in Asia. Take India, for example: At the beginning of the year, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar estimated that as many digital transactions are processed in one month on the subcontinent as in the United States in three years. The system, called Unified Payment Interface (UPI), is revolutionizing the banking and payment world in India. In December 2023 alone, more than 12 billion UPI transactions were processed – and the trend is growing.

Digital Technologies as the Ultimate Solution for India

Certainly, India has more than four times as many inhabitants and thus also potential users of cashless payment technologies than the US. But the sheer size of India’s population alone makes digital technologies the ultimate solution and thus the norm for public administration and enterprises. That’s why India is relying on digital, government-issued identification numbers such as the Virtual Payment Address (VPA) for cashless transactions.

One major driver of developments like this is “Digital India”: The government program launched in 2015 brought significant improvements in technology infrastructure. Improvements that have enhanced social equality, employment opportunities, and digital literacy for all people. In 2022, already nearly two-thirds of the Indian population regularly used the Internet ‒ with hundreds of millions of connections facilitated by the convenience of a mobile device.

Building the Internet Exchange of the Future

From streaming films and sports events, ordering home delivery from restaurants and shops, and booking flights and vacations, to buying groceries at a corner shop with your virtual wallet – in an ever-evolving digital landscape like India’s, the need for cutting-edge infrastructure is paramount. Internet Exchanges (IXs) are at the forefront of this evolution, tasked with meeting the escalating digital demands and interconnecting networks to enable data to flow to where it is needed. DE-CIX leads the charge in shaping the next generation of IXs, focusing on performance, scalability, automation, and resilience to create the Internet Exchange of tomorrow – not only for digital payment transactions in India, but for the entire digital world.

DE-CIX is the world’s leading operator of Internet Exchanges and offers its interconnection services in more than 50 metro markets in Europe, Africa, North America, the Middle East, and Asia. Accessible from data centers in over 600 cities world-wide, DE-CIX interconnects thousands of network operators, Internet service providers, content providers and enterprise networks from more than 100 countries, and offers peering, cloud, and other interconnection services.

In India, DE-CIX’s carrier- and data center-neutral Internet Exchange (IX) ecosystem boasts over 600 network connections across locations in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. DE-CIX India is now present in 61 Points of Presence (PoPs), including 22 independent data centers and 39 in collaboration with Lightstorm. Tailored interconnection services are crucial in meeting the diverse needs of societies and enterprises. By extending its focus to services like cloud connectivity and automation tools, DE-CIX simplifies access and management for businesses of all sizes. To facilitate ultra-low latency data exchange and seamless scalability, automation plays a pivotal role in our approach.

Resilient Infrastructures for Digital Economies and Societies

DE-CIX is committed to next-generation scalability in its pursuit of high-performance interconnection platforms. Resilience against outages is a top priority in every critical infrastructure. We achieve this through redundant hardware deployment and strategic geographical distribution of our high-performance interconnection platforms across multiple data centers, ensuring resilience against localised disruptions. In India, this means that our customers can connect via more than 20 data centers in the five metro markets where DE-CIX is present.

Resilience not only drives the development of state-of-the-art infrastructure like DE-CIX’s, but also digitalisation itself. During Covid many countries in Europe initially attempted to manage the pandemic through faxes, spreadsheets in various formats, and analog reporting channels. While India was already on a digital-first trajectory, the pandemic further accelerated the adoption of contactless digital technology. A mindset that not only makes India one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, but also one of the most valuable: According to a Nasscom-Arthur D Little report, Digital Public Infrastructures (DPI) are set to drive India towards a $1 trillion digital economy by 2030. DPIs such as Aadhaar, FASTag and the Unified Payments Interface for the many monthly cashless transactions running on the infrastructure that programs like Digital India promote and IX operators like DE-CIX.