In Melbourne for the week for APRICOT 2020. Someone jokingly said it’s should be “APRICOT and RPKI 2020”. :-)
It seems like both JPNIC and TWNIC are doing a good job at promoting their member operators in Japan & Taiwan for signing ROA. I thought to check for the status in India to find how India is doing.
I had calls with a couple of friends over this week and somehow discussion IPv6 deployment came up. “How much has been IPv6 deployment in India now in 2020” is a very interesting question. It’s often added with - “how much of my traffic will flow over IPv6 once it is enabled”?
There is a drastic difference in IPv6 deployment depending on which statistic we are looking at here in India. There can be a bunch of factors based on which we can try to judge IPv6 deployment:
IRINN (Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers) is a NIR (National Internet Registry) for India operating under the APNIC RIR (Regional Internet Registry). IRINN is run and managed by NIXI. It’s a decent NIR and was set up in 2012. Indian organisations have the option to either maintain relation with APNIC or with IRINN.
A large number of small networks prefer IRINN because it’s annual charges are 25000 INR / $351 USD against APNIC’s membership fee which is over 2x of that.
Hello world from Gujarat! This is my 3rd visit to Gujarat. :)
Coming to today’s post: I have noticed ISPs doing really crazy things to maximise traffic on peerings and IXPs. Some of those are bad and some are very bad. Additionally I came across this comment and thought to put this quick post.
Example of some bad ways to increase IXP traffic:
Using upstream’s ASN to keep AS path shorter (yes, believe me I have seen that!)
Since last week of Nov 2019, I am having serious issues with Airtel at my home. Somehow 4G signal SNR is very poor and most of the calls just fail on that. Airtel support just mentioned that they are putting a new site in my area in Jan 2020 but fail to explain why suddenly it went so bad. I can imagine that support team staff does not have visibility to network in real-time and likely it would be an issue with the 4G antenna on one or more towers. 2G signal was good but latency was extremely high to connect call plus calls still failed regardless (maybe due to high strain on 2G).
Last week I visited Delhi and spent some time at the “Regulating for Inclusion” workshop. I usually do not attend non-NOG events but this one seemed interesting and was relatively easy to attend as was in Delhi.
There is quite a bit of talk as well as focus on the backhaul capacity but somehow discussion missed a very important element of the picture - Internet Exchange Points (IXP). Unless we have a vibrant number of exchanges and a broad sense to build & promote exchanges, we cannot really tap the Gig capacity of modern fibre to the home systems. In the absence of IXPs, we would end up in having a large part of interconnection in Mumbai, Chennai (and possibly Delhi, though Noida seems to be the case instead of Delhi). Imagine the amount of backhaul capacity we would need on the middle mile in these cases. Furthermore, traffic going out of region reduces the resiliency of the overall system in case of high-stress periods of natural disaster etc.
In March 2018 I mapped nodes of Facebook globally using the airport string they use in the CDN URLs (detailed post here). Since then I posted a couple of times updates on as they are adding more nodes. There also have been questions via emails and comments on the blog in recent times about updated data.
Here goes latest data as on 22 Nov 2019. It’s published here.
Total nodes increased from 2204 as from Aug 2018 to 3184 now in Nov 2019.
I am in Chiang Mai, Thailand for APNIC 48 conference. Earlier today attended APIX meeting where many IX members from Asian community gave an update including NIXI i.e National Internet Exchange of India.
As per the update NIXI now allows content players to peer at the exchange. NIXI earlier had a strict requirement of telecom license for anyone to peer but as of now it allows anyone with IP address and AS number to be part of the exchange just like all other exchanges. This is a really good development coming this year after their announcement of the removal of x-y charge. One strange thing remains that their website is still not updated to reflect that which is probably just work in progress. As per representative from NIXI they now openly welcome all content players to peer at NIXI.
Last month I noticed quite high latency with Cisco’s OpenDNS from my home fibre connection. The provider at home is IAXN (AS134316) which is peering with content folks in Delhi besides transit from Airtel.
ping -c 5 208.67.222.222
PING 208.67.222.222 (208.67.222.222) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=4 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=5 ttl=51 time=103 ms
--- 208.67.222.222 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 103.377/103.593/103.992/0.418 ms
This is bit on the higher side as from Haryana to Mumbai (OpenDNS locations list here). My ISP is backhauling from Faridabad which is probably 6-8ms away from my city and 2-3ms further to Delhi and from there to Mumbai around 30ms. Thus latency should be around ~40-45ms.
It’s kind of fun times in India with many IX’es showing up and now NIXI finally removing their traffic wise charge.
I came across this email which they sent to their member networks recently:
From: I X <[ix@nixi.in](mailto:ix@nixi.in)\>
Sent: Thu, 21 Feb 2019 12:48:31 GMT+0530
To: "members " <[members@nixi.in](mailto:members@nixi.in)\>
Cc: "[ceo@nixi.in](mailto:ceo@nixi.in)" <[ceo@nixi.in](mailto:ceo@nixi.in)\>
Subject: Change in Data Transfer Charges (X-Y)
Dear Members,
In reference to the Board's direction to reduce the current data transfer (X-Y) charges from Re. 1/GB to Rs. 0/GB. The said reduction in X-Y charges to Rs. 0/GB is being implemented with effect from 1st March 2019.
This is for your kind information please.
Thanks & Regards.
National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI)
[www.nixi.in](http://www.nixi.in/)