Secretary-General Toure, Excellencies, Ministers,
Ambassadors, distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen: I represent the
Caribbean island nation of Grenada, a small country of about a hundred thousand
people and an economy of one and a half billion dollars per year. Our size has been no impediment to the
development of our Internet economy, however.
Our island has six networks, four of which are already
IPv6-enabled.
We have built an Internet exchange point, which, although
it is only now entering its fourth year of operation, is already producing 70
megabits of bandwidth, or more than 600 bits per capita, approximately double
the per-capita production of leading countries in the region like Argentina and
Colombia, which have had IXPs for much longer. This puts Grenada on the path to
Internet bandwidth self-sufficiency, and protects the privacy of Grenadian
citizen’s traffic from foreign interception.
Grenada also hosts three root nameservers on-island, as
well as our dot-GD country-code nameservers, anycasts dot-GD from nearly a hundred
other locations around the world, and is well on its way to protecting its
domain names with DNSSEC cryptographic signatures.
While achieving each of these milestones required work,
the financial outlay has been minuscule and has been recouped many times
over. Ninety percent of Internet
exchange points cost between four thousand and forty thousand U.S. dollars to
build, and ninety percent of Internet exchange points repay their investment
between three days and three weeks.
Grenada’s IXP demonstrated the truth of those statistics, costing less
than five thousand dollars to build, and repaying that investment in its first
month of operation.
Our success is neither unique nor even a statistical
outlier. Grenada’s experience has
sparked a wave of Internet development within the Caribbean region, and many of
these same milestones have now been achieved in neighboring countries, large
and small. If Grenada and the other
countries of the Caribbean can do this, so too can any nation. All that’s required is a commitment to the
open governance mechanisms of the Internet, and a willingness to welcome
competition and cooperation in the private sector.
Thank you, and I wish you a productive Plenipotentiary.
|