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.
This is a common discussion topic when I tell friends in Indian network operators that I work from home. As soon as I say that, they ask me - “How good is the connectivity at your home?” And of course like all answers in engineering - it depends. :)
So I have two links at my home: IAXN and Siti broadband. IAXN is a FTTH connection with 50Mbps down and 25Mbps up, while Siti broadband is a DOCSIS connection with ~60Mbps down and 25Mbps up.