I was recently discussing with a friend Jio’s Fifa streaming issues. Considering PNI capacity challenges with other telcos, I wonder if they were serving FIFA streams out of their network or if it would be on some CDN like Akamai. As I was testing, I noticed a couple of megs of flow data with my provider’s local IP. Turns out that was a local Google GGC node in Rohtak and as I try to connect to it, it replies on HTTP port 80 and 443. The port 443 response is rather more interesting because while connecting to IP throws an error, it does give me the SSL certificate out of handshake and now I know it’s indeed Google! :)

In Aug of this year, I posted about three-phase power. Subsequently, I had a discussion with a friend from Delhi about bonding neutral with earth/ground at the distribution panel. He has a commercial load of 20KW delivered via three phases and his electrician advised him to bond neutral with the ground. We both were curious whether it was technically correct or not. Taking a break from network engineering, here goes a post about it.

Yesterday there was an article in the Indian paper Financial Express with the title “OTTs may have to pay access charge to telcos”.

Quoting a few points from the article:

• Social media intermediaries like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter, and over-the-top (OTT) players like Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+Hotstar may have to pay a carriage charge to telecom service providers
• Data, particularly video, comprises 70% of the overall traffic flow on telecom networks, and this would grow further with the rollout of 5G services
• Upon reference from the DoT, Trai is currently studying various possible models under which OTTs can be brought within the purview of some form of regulation
• According to sources, an interconnect regime is a must between OTTs and telcos because as 5G services grow, there would be immense data/ video load on networks, which may lead to them getting clogged or even crashing at times.

This concept of “OTTs must pay” is not new. This has been argued a few times in past. Exactly ten years ago in 2012 I wrote a blog post about Bharti Airtel expecting Google/YouTube to pay. At that time they could not convince OTTs to pay. Why is this renewed interest now? Well, that has to do with the first SK Telecom (South Kore telecom) Vs Netflix court case in South Korea where SK Telecom claimed that a large part of bandwidth utilization was because of Netflix and hence they should pay a “fair share” of their traffic which they lost. Soon around this multiple of large telecom monopolies in Europe started this discussion in their respective geography. Four of the top EU players - Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone and Telefonica are of opinion that OTTs should share the burden (news here). And hence Indian telcos possibly looking to renew this debate.

In Hyderabad for the weekend to participate in GFCE workshop at IIIT Hyderabad. I like GFCE workshops as they are short & to the point. This will be my third one after Delhi and Kolkata. These are round table discussions covering concepts like IPv6, routing security, DNS, email security protocols etc. I will be sharing updates on RPKI in the region and participating in the discussion about this wide varieties of topics.

Upcoming presentations

Next week will be APNIC 54 conference followed by SGNOG 9 (Singapore Network Operators Group) event. I will be attending both events. At APNIC 54 I will be doing a short tutorial on “Running Containers in Production” with CI/CD pipelines with a focus on its utility in network engineering and also a panel discussion on “World IPv6 2022 - the story behind the events”. This should be fun!