Analysing Google Cloud routing tiers

Anurag Bhatia
Back in 2017, Google Cloud launched a low-performance tier and effectively gave an option to their customers of “cheaper” bandwidth with slightly reduced performance. This page describes their network tiers in detail. That page says - “Cost optimized: Traffic between the internet and VM instances in your VPC network is routed over the internet in general.” Background For a while, I wanted to find out how this works. In network routing this concept is known as “hot potato routing Vs cold potato routing”.

Tour of Skytel IPTV Headend

Anurag Bhatia
Last month after the mnNOG 5 event in Mongolia, I got a chance to visit Skytel’s IPTV headend. Skytel is one of the large Mongolian operators doing mobile and fixed-line networks. Tour of network infrastructure is always interesting and this time it was not just IP but broadcast network over the IP which excited me. In past, I have visited datacenters, IXPs etc and those are mostly IP (layer 3) or ethernet (layer 2) networks.

Internet in Mongolia and CDNs

Anurag Bhatia
I have been in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for the last few days. This is my first travel to Mongolia and this far up in the North (except for previous travel to Russia in 2016 and some parts of Nordic areas in Europe). Geographically Mongolia is located between Russia (on the North side) and China (on the South side). I am here for mnNOG 5 event. mnNOG is the Mongolian Network Operators Group.