02 Jun

NPIX Traffic reaches hits 1Gbps!

Seems like NPIX traffic has started hitting 1Gbps levels and that is just so amazing. Came across this post by Niranjan.

 

 

NPIX or Nepal Internet Exchange is located in Kathmandu and operates out of its own datacenter. There’s a huge amount of (overhead) dark fibre availability in Kathmandu and as of the writing of this post I see 30 members at NPIX. 1Gbps might seem low from Western IX’es standards but that’s a quite good amount of traffic for an IX in South Asian region. If you see the member list there are just smaller ISPs and not many content players over there. Comparing numbers by NIXI traffic, NPIX has more traffic now than NIXI Kolkata, NIXI Bangalore, NIXI Hyderabad and NIXI Ahmedabad combined! and it’s so disheartening to see such low numbers at NIXI and almost no effort being made to fix it over all these years despite so much talk.

NPIX will likely get content players soon. They do not have any policy problem in hosting them, unlike NIXI which expects participating networks with ISP license. Last update on this was from Mr Rajesh Charia (who is on the board of NIXI & also President of ISPAI) during APRICOT 2016 in New Zealand. He had a discussion with Kam Sze from Akamai over bandwidth requirements of Akamai cache. As the discussion proceeded, Owen Delong from Akamai pointed out Akamai’s strategy of connecting to IX and at this point, Mr Rajesh said that NIXI is into the discussion to allow content & CDN players to NIXI fabric.

 

 

Unfortunately, this is still not done! 🙁

While writing this post I felt the pretty strong earthquake here in North India.

 

With the hope that everyone is safe, time to get some sleep!

31 May

BGP Administrative Shutdown Communication

I recently came across an excellent draft at IETF by Job Snijders &  friends.  This is to address scenarios where a network might miss communication about a maintenance activity when BGP shutdown happens. Once implemented, this can potentially offer to send peer a message with up to 128 bytes with info about shutdown like “Ticket XXX: We are upgrading the router, will be back live in 1hr” etc. It depends by appending such data to the sys notification which is part of BGP protocol. This is one which sends a message just before the shutdown of the session. So it similar to the way you see session tearing down due to prefix limits etc. This has already been implemented in some of the open source routing implementations like OpenBGPd, GoBGP, PMacct, Exabgp etc.

 

Here’s the latest draft of this change: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-idr-shutdown-09. And here’s Job’s talk from NANOG conference at the start of this year.

 

Hopefully, we will see this implemented across large vendor routers!