Isp-Column

India - Bangladesh bandwidth agreement, BSNL routing & more!

Last month India & Bangladesh went into an agreement for power and bandwidth. India stated export of an additional 100MW of power to Bangladesh while Bangladesh started a 10Gbps link to Indian state of Tripura. (News article on this here)

Tripura

Tripura is an Indian state having its boundaries with Bangladesh as you can see in above map. Coming to routing side of things setup is that BSNL (AS9829) is buying IP transit from Bangladesh Submarine Cable Co. Ltd (BSCCL) at $1.2 million / year. This means a cost of around $10/Mbps/month or 662Rs/Mbps/month. It’s hard to say if it’s good or bad since other link from BSNL is via it’s other links. But yes it’s good to see a layer 3 connectivity in terms of IP transit relationship rather then leasing dark fiber or L1 waves as they would have caused bit inefficient routing in the area. In order to do this BSNL has setup a “gateway node” at Agartala. I think it would be pretty much a node with approvals under ILD from doT and extremely likely a LIM device for lawful interception.   Months before it actually came up, Dyn research tweeted about this visible routing relationship.  

APRICOT 2016 - Auckland, New Zealand

First and foremost before talking about APRICOT, I must say I am deeply moved with impact Rohtak (and Haryana) as whole had because of recent Jat agitation. What I find extremely depressing is way current Govt. of Haryana completely failed to control it and the way previous Govt. ministers did best in their interest and completely against the interest of people of Haryana. For now quite hopeful with news that Mr Prakash Singh (one of my favorite IPS officers) who did quite well during his various terms is looking into failure of police. More details about the news here. I will write more on this later on, not good time right now since tensions have yet to get normal.  

bdNOG 4 - Presentation on Misused top ASNs

This week I presented in bdNOG 4 on “Misused top ASNs”. It was a study we at Hurricane Electric did to see how many times AS1, AS2 and AS3 appeared in global routing table between 2010 and 2015. This highlights cases where AS1, AS2 or AS3 appeared as a result of wrong prepend.  

My presentation is embedded below:

Overall bdNOG 4 had been a great experience. It’s good to see a nice NOG community actively sharing technical know-how, sharing experiences, and much more. I must say that is something I greatly miss in India. More on bdNOG conference later on.

Why airport wifi sucks?

IMG_20151108_183647     Sitting at Kolkata airport. Noticed the usual “Free Wifi in the area!” message and connected to Tata Docomo Free wifi. Performance was quite poor.   Two key issues with wifi:

  1. Using of only 2.4Ghz (802.11b/g/n with 20Mhz channel). No AP with 5Ghz box. (Click here to view scanner data). Should have been 5Ghz
  2. Entire traffic is getting tunnel via Mumbai i.e West India (while I am sitting on Eastern side). Adding up to latency and performance significantly.

Here are some of traces to random locations:

K root route leak by AS49505 - Selectel, Russia

There seems be an ongoing route leak by AS49505 (Selectel, Russia) for K root server.

K root server’s IP: 193.0.14.129
Origin Network: AS25152  

Here’s trace from Airtel Looking Glass, Delhi PoP

Mon Oct 26 16:21:18 GMT+05:30 2015
traceroute 193.0.14.129
Mon Oct 26 16:21:22.053 IST
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 193.0.14.129
 1   \*
    203.101.95.146 19 msec  4 msec
 2  182.79.224.73 14 msec  3 msec  1 msec
 3  14.141.116.89.static-Delhi.vsnl.net.in (14.141.116.89) 7 msec  3 msec  2 msec
 4  172.23.183.134 26 msec  45 msec  26 msec
 5  ix-0-100.tcore1.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net (180.87.38.5) 151 msec  153 msec  152 msec
 6  if-9-5.tcore1.WYN-Marseille.as6453.net (80.231.217.17) \[MPLS: Label 383489 Exp 0\] 160 msec  163 msec  155 msec
 7  if-2-2.tcore2.WYN-Marseille.as6453.net (80.231.217.2) \[MPLS: Label 595426 Exp 0\] 161 msec  162 msec  162 msec
 8  if-7-2.tcore2.FNM-Frankfurt.as6453.net (80.231.200.78) \[MPLS: Label 399436 Exp 0\] 149 msec  151 msec  155 msec
 9  if-12-2.tcore1.FNM-Frankfurt.as6453.net (195.219.87.2) 164 msec  163 msec  159 msec
 10 195.219.156.146 153 msec  151 msec  160 msec
 11 spb03.transtelecom.net (188.43.1.226) 190 msec  192 msec  189 msec
 12 Selectel-gw.transtelecom.net (188.43.1.225) 185 msec  185 msec  185 msec
 13 k.root-servers.net (193.0.14.129) 183 msec  204 msec  196 msec
RP/0/8/CPU0:DEL-ISP-MPL-ACC-RTR-9#

The routing information (show route 193.0.14.129 output) from their looking glass doesn’t seems useful since it shows that it’s learning K root Noida route via NIXI. This is likely because routing information is different from actual forwarding information in that device. So the trace looks extremely weird. It’s leading traffic to K root which does has anycast instance in Noida, landing into Russia!   Why is that happening? Let’s look at what Tata Communications (AS6453) routing table has for K root’s prefix. I am looking at feed of AS6453 which it’s putting into RIPE RIS RRC 03 collector.

K root server - Noida anycast and updates

K root in Noida seems to be not getting enough traffic from quite sometime and connectivity does seems bit broken. This is a blog post following up to Dyn’s excellent and detailed post about how TIC leaked the world famous 193.0.14.0/24 address space used by AS25152. It was good to read this post from RIPE NCC written by my friend Emile (and thanks to him for crediting me to signal about traffic hitting outside!)  

BSNL AS9829 - A rotten IP backbone

Today I met a good friend and he has recently moved back into Rohtak (like me!) and was crying over BSNL’s issues. He has issues of unstable DSL due to last mile and I told him that even if last mile works well, BSNL still has got ton of issues with their IP backbone traffic.   It’s Sunday late night out here in India and I am having really pathetic connectivity with just everywhere except Google. With Google only key difference I noted is that my TCP session to Google’s services is terminating at Mumbai and not Delhi anymore. First and formost, I did trace to spectranet.in (which is last company I was working for) to see how is my latency with server hosting it: