Today I came across a nicely written article in Business Standard on NOFN. Article’s title was “NOFN: A distant dream”. I must say it is one of good articles I have seen so far on the topic and most of other articles appeared to be factually incorrect and more like Press Releases of UPA.  

Some key points from the Business Standard article:

According to a top official at the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), the project was conceptualised without a proper study. “NOFN would connect 2.5 lakh villages from the block level. But, no study was done on the details on optic fibre still the Block level, and how healthy those fibres are. Experts say that the NOFN project does not include service offering. It is just about the laying of optic fibres. For end-to-end services, service providers will have to set up their own infrastructure at the gram panchayat level. While the initial cost was projected at Rs 20,000 crore for the NOFN project, private companies will need to pump in much more than this amount to offer services to end customers.

Today was voting day in many states including Haryana (where I stay) and I just casted vote. This was 2nd time I voted and first time when I voted in a Lok Sabha election (last time being for local Municipal Election). 

Sometimes back I came across a very nice lecture by one of Indian scholar, politician, author and lot more Mr Arun Shourie.  

Some key points of his lecture

• Political situation has degraded significantly and during the time he gave this lecture. Four of politicians including Haryana’s Ex-CM were in jail for some really serious charges. 
• We are not using rights of freedom for the re-construction of society. Media is one of key institutions which has degraded so much. 
• We feel proud to say that we are largest democracy though real bitter truth is that most of that is a complete disarray. 
• No party in current time believes in ideology, idea or ideals. It’s plainly politics to get in power. (I personally disagree to this though). 
• We have got lot’s of media channels and that make us feel very proud of though most just work in same manner. The pattern as well as the news is almost same on each of them. Diversity & plurality is not there. 
• There’s a very organized structure of paid media in form of “rate cards” where certain rates are provided in well defined pattern for giving better news coverage. 
• Indian media is very much into giving excessive coverage to insignificant events while there’s almost no interest in critical issues like state of defence, our position w.r.t. China, our internal security etc. 
• Indian media has gone so much into “manipulation mode” that they use a lot of “So you mean to say….” kind of statement to make things more exciting while loosing the actual value in discussion. 
• There’s almost no coverage in mainstream Indian media on scientific developments. New which has potential to impact our life significantly is not given any importance at all. 
• Elite Indian class considers India to be a “Knowledge Super Power” even though without knowledge, no read and opinion on everything. :) 
• There’s too much of balanced journalism where idea is to show two sides and end every debate with yes & no kind of situation. There’s no analysis or use of mind - it’s all just like showing a balanced, unquestionable picture of everything. While in real life there’s only side, only one side is right and not two sides. 
• (Best advise:) Do not waste time in watching TV when it’s showing useless crap news. Just turn it off and watch TED talk or Authors @ Google videos talk on YouTube. :)
• There’s a false sense that Indian society has become intolerant. Truth is that it’s all about weak state control.
• Lokpal likely won’t help and all we need is three key changes in judiciary - No adjournments at all, Preponderance of probability and punishment not just in form of fine but also a ban from public life. 
• Sad truth is that over time India is becoming weaker and weaker due to extremely poor governance. India is moreover governed by bureaucracy and not really political leadership.

Some personal thoughts… 

I really wish to read his books and infact meet him someday in person. There are lot of things to learn from his experience. As Disinvestment Minister he was one of key persons in VSNL (Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd) disinvestment during Vajpayee’s Govt. This was time when this precious telecommunications infrastructure got investments from Tata Group which later turned it into Tata Communication after merging assets of VSNL, Tyco Global Network and TeleGlobe. 

And my post on 1st April. Don’t take it as April fool post ;)

Multiple times NIXI’s AS24029 has been reported as acting like transit ASN for multiple networks. I have analysed it in past and this is very much because of route leaks by few specific networks. I have explained difference in peering Vs transit routes and their handling previously on my blog.

In short: A network is supposed to re-announce it’s peering and transit routes only to customer and not to any other peer or upstream. Whenever NIXI’s ASN appears in global routing table, its always the case where one or more networks are re-announcing routes learnt via NIXI to their upstream transits. 

And I am back from Malaysia after attending APRICOT 2014. It was a slightly slow event this time as less people came up due to change of location from Thailand to Malaysia. But I kind of enjoy the APRICOT in start of year. :)

It has been quite sometime when I blogged. After getting into Spectranet I got relatively more busy along with bit of travelling to Delhi NCR which has been taking lot of time. I wish to blog more over time. 

Quick update: I will be attending APRICOT 2014 in Malaysia. Excited to attend workshops & conference with the geeky networking community. author: “Anurag Bhatia” url: “/2014/02/update/apricot-2014-malaysia/”

Incase you are around, drop me a message and I would be happy to meet!

And I am back in India after a long Europe trip and enjoying food again ;)

Some quick updates from Professional life

1. I have quit from my job at PCH and won’t have an active full time involvement anymore.
2. It is always nice to work under great leadership - at PCH it was Mr Bill Woodcock and I thoroughly enjoyed learning lot of things from him. 
3. This situation always brings me to hard thoughts where you really want to stay in an organization and work under a leader you like but get into a mis-match of Organization’s requirement and goals with your personals goals and what you like doing etc. 
4. I am joining National Indian ISP  - Spectranet / Citycom Networks as full time job and will be working with Network Planning & Operations team of Spectranet AS10029. 
5. I will be working on multi-gigabit multi-homed core network of Spectranet AS10029 in optimization, upgradation as well as day to day operations of backbone. 
6. This would be “officially” my first job with an Indian company. Closest I had earlier was my internship in Chennai based Zohocorp during my 1st year summer break at college. 

That’s all for updates for now. Ending this post with a nice selected scenic view from my Europe trip :)

I thought about this long back - “Who pays to whom in case of internet bandwidth?” I have been working in this domain from sometime and so far I have learnt that it’s really complex. I will try to put a series of blog post to give some thoughts on this subject. Firstly we have to understand that when we talk about “bandwidth price” it’s often layer 3 bandwidth which you buy in form of capacity over ethernet GigE, Ten-GigE and so on (or STMs if you are in India). As we know from back school class in networking - layer 3 works over layer 2 and so to deliver “bandwidth” on layer 3, one needs layer 2 physical circuit. Price paid by companies on layer 2 Vs layer 3 varies significantly based on their location, type of business, their target goal etc. E.g a content heavy company like Google pays hell lot of money on layer 2 circuits while it is strongly believed among networking community that Google is a tier 1 network and hence a “transit free” zone and they do not pay any amount on layer 3. In general the trend is pretty much as big networks have larger network footprint and connected “PoPs” over layer 2 (leading to a higher layer 2 bill) while relatively lower layer 3 bill while small networks depend significantly just on transit bandwidth (in form of layer3) and have very low layer 2 footprint.  

My Europe trip is going good (so far!). Interesting experiences in meeting people across half a dozen of countries. 

Few key things I noticed so far:

1. Food is a much bigger problem for a vegetarian like me in Europe then in a English speaking country like US or Singapore. Living on fruits, dry fruits, bread etc from Sunday and do feeling slightly weak. 
2. Non-veg food is so high that smell of pork, etc in supermarket makes me to literally lose senses. 
3. Internet connections are “awesome” almost everywhere. I get 4-5Mbps at free wifi hotspots and 15-20Mbps at hotel/offices/dorms etc. 
4. Public transport is lot better than that of US. This is one major drawbacks of California while for other areas in US it isn’t impressive anyways. 
5. Pre-paid cell phone connections are relatively cheap and one can get them easily for pretty low price. 
6. Public peering and availability of layer 2 media is lot more in Europe then anywhere else in world!
7. European folks travel a lot for fun. Something which we don’t really see in India. :)
8. Smoking, consumption of drugs seems lot more common and bigger fashion out here as compared to any other part of world I have been to so far. 
9. Place is somewhat less secure as compared to US. 
10. Popular place are full of lines e.g I stood in line for getting entry to Eiffel Tower in Paris. 

Some free time here in Europe and thus time for another quick blog post & to take my mind away from depressing people!

One of impressive features of major European networks is support for BGP communities. In India it’s almost non-existent. Setting it up isn’t hard technically but from capacity management side, Indian ISPs are somewhat shy in setting it up.

Let’s put a case where we have a Customer router (R1 with AS1), upstream of customer (R2 with AS2), upstream of upstream (R3 with AS3), peer of upstream (R4 with router4). Let’s try to setup communities so that customer at AS1 can control his BGP announcements and announce some prefixes to AS3 and some to AS4 selectively to control inbound traffic flow. 

And a quick blog post from Delhi airport. Time for my trip to Europe. This is going to be a super interesting trip with lot of roaming and meeting around.  If you are in Schengen area and want to say hi! then just buzz me! :)

Off to Europe for sometime!