Messed up connectivity of root servers in India

Today I was showing a good friend - how root servers are working and how they are connected. I was explaining him anycasting and gave example of k-root node which is hosted in Delhi by niXi i.e National Internet Exchange of India. I was totally stunned to find traceroute result to anycasting based block of k-root-node hosted in Delhi from my BSNL connection. Checkout traceroute here.

It seems like BSNL has gone totally wild in listening to announcements for 193.0.14.0/23 via ASN 25152 which is of  RIPE-NCC-K-ROOT nodes.

Instead of hearing block via nixi or direct connection with AS25152, BSNL is listening to AS 7018 which of At&t. Thus for a end user like me who is sitting in middle of village in Haryana, just 150Km’s away from k-root node, BSNL is routing traffic to UK on AboveNet network.

Next, I tried testing connectivity with rest of 3 root servers, and it seems like one other node - j-root servers with IP - 192.58.128.30.

J-Root node is also using anycasting (just like rest all root servers) and is hosted in Mumbai.

Here's traceroute to j-root node.

As we see, it’s passing on traffic towards Paris via Tata Comm (AS4755 & AS6453). Here again BSNL should have listened annocement of 192.58.128.0/24 by AS 26415 which it should able to reach via niXi Mumbai exchange point, but it’s just messed up. This further gave me clue that Tata Comm is also not routing things properly.

Here's a traceroute from IDEA Cellular 3G network which using Tata & Airtel for backbone internet connectivity.

and here is for J-root-node.

Well, clearly connectivity with 2 out of 4 root servers is screwed up in India.

Only i-root-node and f-root nodes seem OK.

With hope India will eventually have better connectivity, catch you later!