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BASSETERRE, St Kitts (SKNIS) -- The government of St Kitts and Nevis is engaging internet service providers LIME and The Cable to address concerns and iron out functionality issues related to the recent acquisition of an Internet Domain Name System Root Server.

The piece of technology – donated by the United States-based company Packet Clearing House (PCH) – converts the names of websites such as www.gov.kn into numbers that are then used by a computer to correctly identify the location of the sites on the internet.

“The root contains details about where .kn is, where .com .net and all the other many TLDs (top-level domains) that exist out there,” explained Jonny Martin, an internet analyst at PCH. “Without DNS servers, effectively there is no internet unless people want to be typing in long numbers that will be hard to remember.”

“It is vitally important that all parts of the internet have fast and reliable access to one of these root servers. So by bringing a root server here to St Kitts it now means that the internet is going to get a little bit faster when these name resolutions are done,” Martin added. “The other thing it does is [it] provides a lot more resiliency. In the case of an international cable cut this name resolution can still take place so it’s a continuing step in the efforts to build a more solid and reliable and resilient internet infrastructure.”

Government’s ICT policy adviser Pierre Bowrin said that it was important that all parties are on the same page.

“We really want to make this function well, we want to make sure that the operations are smooth and it is imperative that we do so so that the benefits ... [of this system] are realized,” Bowrin stated, noting that this step is in keeping with government’s strategic development objective. He added that he was looking forward to ongoing discussions and was excited by the continuing steps to upgrade the information technology infrastructure in the Federation.

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