“Users will feel changes by the end of the year”

Interview of the Director of Armenian Internet Traffic Exchange Foundation (ARMIX) Vahan Hovsepyan to Itel.am

- ARMIX was established approximately a year ago. What accomplishments has it had so far?

- After its establishment, ARMIX waited for the support of the Armenian government for a long time. The latter had promised to assist the activity of the Foundation, including in terms of premises, since that was one of the most serious issues in the context of its specificity.

The premise was to be located somewhere around 4 Tigran Mets Street, where the cable network was historically established, and moving it to another place would be especially difficult. The Ministry of Economy promised to help as to the issue of the premise, however after waiting for a long time we rented it at our own expense.

Technical works were initiated in November, 2010, and today 6 providers exchange traffic.

What is the importance of this initiative?

In the first place is the safety of our traffic, secondly – speed and expenses. For instance, if in order to go from one building to another in Yerevan the traffic passes through Frankfurt, naturally, it will cost a lot more. Traffic exchange reduces the cost and increases the speed of data transfer, and this, in the long run, should have its effect on the users. Users will feel changes by the end of the year. The third one is diversification of connection channels. It is not a secret that Armenia often faces the problem of disruptions of external internet channels. Of course, there is interconnect today among local providers basing on peer-to-peer (p2p) principle, however the transmission capacity of 10Mb can secure only exchange of the provider’s service traffic, but not all the reserve backup.

- How many companies cooperate in the frames of ARMIX Foundation? Are there prospects to expand the sphere of activity?    

- 13 companies have joined the declaration on establishing the Foundation, two of which are big companies (VivaCell-MTS and Orange). “ArmenTel” Company is also expected to join. There was a tentative agreement reached with it in November, 2010. The company stated that they would start discussing the issue of possible membership in ARMIX after the launch of the Foundation’s operations. It seems to me that this issue may be clarified in the course of a month.

Concerning enhancement of the sphere of the Foundation’s activity, we can say that due to reduction of prices and increase in the speed of internal traffic, we get the chance to develop local content and place resources on local hosting servers. This will lead to development of hosting service in Armenia, which is in a sad condition today, as compared to Georgia.