Attending NANOG 75 in San Francisco. I have always found NANOG very fascinating w.r.t the size of event and a fact that internet started in this side of world.
Yesterday was day 0 with Hackathon and task was network automation with ZTP, Ansible, Open/R for IGP etc. 😄
Our team’s presentation about it:
India has been deploying large scale optical fiber to the rual areas under NOFN / BBNL. Overall the project is not well thought off and as have written previously about it - the choice of “Gram Panchayats” may not be the best option. Furthermore it’s a project about backhual/backbone fiber and not last mile. Project vaguely expects private sector to be doing last mile with no clear plans on how it would be executed.
As mentioned in part 1 of this post, this part contains the map of GPON OLTs for BBNL network. You like to see part 2 of this post which has map of the fiber point of interconnects.
As mentioned in part 1 of the post, this part contains the map of fibre point of interconnects for BBNL network. This is one of the interesting parts of the network and if executed well, it can be a really great middle mile. Though I haven’t seen any ground deployment as yet of the same. Will explore more in PoIs around my city.
While I am spending time on APNIC’s security workshop here at APNIC 46, I got curious about DNSSEC deployment across ccTLDs.
For those who may be unaware, DNSSEC adds signature the DNS responses making it possible to cryptographically verify a DNS query response.
Out of 254 ccTLDs, 125 support DNSSEC with a published DS record (at least that is what I get when I check their zone) and 129 do not support it as yet. So, for now, it is at 49.21%.
Earlier this year after APRICOT 2018, I posted a list of visible Facebook FNA (CDN caching) nodes across the world with IPv4, IPv6 and the AS name. I got quite a few mails in following months about people mentioning that they installed nodes but do not see their names in the list (and that was normal since list was static).
I re-ran my script to see emailslatest status of nodes. During last check I saw 1689 nodes (3rd March). Now on 26th Aug i.e after close to 6 months, the total number of nodes has increased to 2204.
Suddenly the voice market in India is becoming very interesting. Earlier it was the case of Jio (and competitors) launching unlimited voice plans and now it’s the case of Govt. of India permitting IP telephony. IP Telephony i.e networks where telephony happens over IP (not to be confused with IP to IP calls but) where IP to PSTN interconnects happen. Till a few months ago IP telephony (or IP-PSTN) interconnection was allowed only under certain conditions like doing it inside a building only for purpose of call centres (with OSP license) or running SIP trunks over private networks. Things like termination of calls originated from the apps was not allowed (where IP-PSTN was happening within India) as well as DID or Direct Inward Dialing numbers were not allowed. There were even cases where apps/businesses had to shut down due to confusing regulation. Here’s a nice article from Medianama about it. But all those were things of past. In May Wifi calling or calls via Wifi where wifi is used loosely and it’s essentially called via any sort of Internet connections were permitted (news here). Later after TRAI’s clarification it now has been formally allowed. While it may not look as attractive as it should have been in the age of WhatsApp calling (IP to IP, not PSTN mess involved!), it still is quite interesting and going to bring some major change.
Railtel (the telecom arm of Indian railways) is running free wifi hotspots across the country in collaboration with Google. It’s there since last two years and started with the MoU between Railtel and Google (news here) back in 2015. Fast forward to 2018 - the free wifi project railway stations seems to be doing quite well with so many users using it. The project covers 361 stations and is expected to reach it’s target of 400 stations soon. The IP network for the service is under the name “Mahataa Information India Private Limited” and originates IP pools from AS134426 - https://bgp.he.net/AS134426#_asinfo. It is a single homed network behind Railtel’s AS24186. https://qz.com/715143/googles-free-wifi-at-indian-railway-stations-is-better-than-most-of-the-countrys-paid-services/ I put an RTI to Railtel asking them about MoU details as well as bandwidth consumption for each state. In their reply, Railtel denied the request for MoU under the exemption from disclosure as well as NDAs they have with Google but they did share detailed of state wise bandwidth consumption.
Out of curiosity, I put an RTI asking President of India Secretariat about connectivity at President’s office.
Question 1: Who is the Internet service provider?
Reply: National Informatics Centre MEITY is providing internet service at President Office.
Question 2: Speed of Internet connection at President’s Office?
Reply: Presently the speed is 100 Mbps.
Question 3: (And my favourite!) Is IPv6 deployed?
Reply: IPv6 supported by most devices. However, IPv4 addressing is used at present.
Just back from APRICOT 2018. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, APNIC had its first Hackathon and it was fun (blog post of APNIC here). There was one project on the ranking of CDNs using RIPE Atlas data. To achieve this team was trying to find strings/hostnames which they can trace to and figure out nearby CDN. As part of that, I suggested them to look into www.facebook.com and carefully noting the sources from where elements get loaded. It’s quite common that Facebook.com (or Google.com for the logic) would be hosted on some server at a large PoP while FNA (or GGC) would serve only specific static content out of it. FNA, of course, sits on the IPs of the ISP hosting it. So in the source list, we found scontent.fktm1-1.fna.fbcdn.net and that gives an idea that FNA strings are around logic: scontent.fxxx1-1.fna.fbcdn.net where xxx is the airport code. 1-1 means 1st PoP in 1st ISP over there probably (strong guess!). If there are more FNA nodes in a given area, the number goes further up. The team used it and for now, the project is over. But while I was on the way back to India, I thought that this is very interesting data if we pull the full picture by querying all possible IATA airport codes with a logic. This logic can be used for two things: