anuragbhatia.com

19 Mar

Making things happen in the government

A fascinating lecture by Mr Anil Swarup (retired IAS, ex-Secretary to Govt. of India & State Govt of UP) at Lt Governer, Puducherry Raj Niwas. His Wikipedia page here and Twitter account here.

The first half is the talk itself, followed by some time of Q&A, followed by a short talk by Mr Ashwani Kumar (Chief Secretary to Government of Pondicherry) and in the end is Lt Governor Kiran Bedi.

Misc notes from this talk

For an idea to fructify in a democracy like ours, it has to politically acceptable, socially desirable, technologically feasible, financially viable, administratively doable and judiciary tenable.
Don’t get agitated about things over which you have no control.
Key thing is to focus and change yourself and rest will just follow.
The digitalisation helps significantly in reducing corruption and adding more transparency.
For solutions to a large number of problems, we do not need to look outside (of the country) but inwards towards various states from the length and breadth of the country.
There was a draconian section clause in the Prevention of Corruption Act 13 (1) d. The clause was: while holding office as a public servant, obtains for any person any valuable thing or pecuniary advantage without any public interest; or (source)

In simple terms, it means that if anyone makes an undue benefit in a process, the bureaucrat will be held for it whether or not he had any benefit from it. Eventually, Modi Govt. in the centre revoked it and this Gazette notification has a new law. Thus now for bonafide mistake bureaucrats are legally protected.
Culture of views & counterviews in the bureaucracy got deteriorated because of RTI activism. “RTI activist” end up in matching the notes of multiple officers & then try to play them against each other.
Systems like Aadhar should have been respected & promoted but became a major target of “activist brigade”. I personally had a discussion with some of the folks who are heavily against the Aadhar and would even go to the extent of suggesting to shut down the program. While they might make a couple of valid points, but a large part of their points come with the fundamental assumption that rest of society, systems, identification technologies etc are utopian in nature!
E-office system of Govt. needs more improvement. In some case, it’s just another system and a process where one has to dump scanned documents instead of actually digitalising.

Ending this post with a poem from Mr Swarup in Hindi! 🙂

समय रुका नहीं, हम क्यू ठहर गए? अभी तो हम चले भी नहीं, फिर क्यू थक गए?
उठो पथिक, उठो पथिक मत भ्रमित हो धूमिल अंधियारे में, श्रेष्ठ वही जो घिरा नहीं हो षणिक निराशा में|
जागो जगाओ, मन मत बहलाओ, एक मसीहा तुम भी बन जाओ |

21 Feb

Indian RPKI ROA status

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.

RPKI ROA status for India

Total prefixes: 40,834 (IPv4 + IPv6)
Prefixes with valid ROA: 4693
Prefixes with invalid ROA: 354
Prefixes without ROA: 35,787

IRR route objects

Prefixes with at least one valid IRR route object: 38,075
Prefixes with invalid route object: 2213
Prefixes with missing route object: 546

The method used to pull this data

Download APNIC extended data: https://ftp.apnic.net/stats/apnic/delegated-apnic-extended-20200221
Find IN ASNs which is APNIC assigned as well as IRINN delegated prefixes.
Find all prefixes originated by these ASNs (assuming a large of them would be used in India only).
Check for IRR and RPKI status for those prefixes.

13 Feb

Indian IPv6 deployment

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“?

Game of numbers

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:

How many operators are offering IPv6 to end users?
How many end-users are on IPv6?
How’s the content available on IPv6 in terms of a number of IPv6 enabled websites?
How’s the content available on IPv6 in terms of traffic volume over IPv6?

First two and last two points are related and point towards from vertically opposite ends. (Call it good or bad) the fact of high centralisation. There has been an ongoing centralisation of mobile operators and in-country like ours they connect a very large number of end-users. The number of fixed-line networks has increased considerably but at the same time in proportion to a number of mobile users they user base growth has been much lower.

On the content side like everywhere else in the world, there’s a lot more centralisation of content. Many of my Indian ISP friends tell me that Google + Akamai + Microsoft + Netflix + Facebook + Cloudflare is way over 75% of their traffic. Think about it, that’s just 6 AS number out of 68000+ odd networks in the world as per BGP routing table. Thus by traffic profile, we are looking at 0.0014% networks serving 75% of content traffic. The reason for such centralisation is actually beyond network and more around the success of products of these organisations followed by factors like the winner (or top 3) gets it all in most of these domains.

For eyeball traffic APNIC IPv6 stats for India (source here) as well as Hurricane Electric’s IPv6 progress report (source here) give us some numbers:

Very few fixed-line operators are offering IPv6 but on the mobile side – a large number of mobile networks are offering IPv6. Jio was on IPv6 since launch and as traffic increased, Airtel as well as Vodafone + IDEA also significantly increased their deployment. On fixed line, it’s just Jio + ACT broadband with any sizable IPv6 footprint. BSNL + Airtel have virtually no deployment. There might be some other network in the list but it’s off the radar.
There are a lot more end users on IPv6 than despite the small number of networks offering it because of the large mobile user base. On Jio 80%+ user base, on Airtel, it’s 45%, on Vodafone & IDEA (merged company but still separate ASNs) it’s close to 50%. That’s the number of users who are connecting over IPv6 when given option of IPv4 and IPv6 as tested by APNIC. That number is huge!
Around 98.5% of TLDs (top-level domain names like .com, .net etc) are IPv6 enabled. For .com & .net domains, only 7% of the domains have an AAAA record (compared to ones having an A record). Most of the numbers are much lower if we look at the content side of IPv6 (ignoring the traffic volume).
If we look at the content players with IPv6 and include the traffic volume numbers then it’s way higher. It is estimated that globally somewhere between 20-30 top ASNs carry 90%+ traffic and almost all of those top 20 are IPv6 enabled.

What do all these numbers actually mean?

If you are an eyeball network in India and you deploy IPv6, you can expect way over 70-80% traffic (by volume) on IPv6.
If you are a content network/datacenter in India and application is targetting to home fixed-line / enterprise network, expect a rather low amount of IPv6 traffic but would be rapidly increasing as more fixed-line networks deploy.
If you are a content network/datacenter in India and content hosted at your end attracts mobile traffic, you can expect way over 50%-60% of that mobile traffic over IPv6.

Some additional reasons to consider deploying IPv6

In India, ISPs need to maintain carrier-grade NAT logs of the translations. If one is doing dual-stack, a large part of traffic will flow over IPv6 saving on those logging requirements.
For ISPs, it will save you from significant strain on CGNAT device.
For content network/webmaster/datacenter – IPv6 will help in delivering your traffic outside of (often) congested CGNAT paths.

Happy IPv6ing! 🙂