Can one reach entire Indian routing table via NIXI?

Someone mailed me asking a very interesting question - “If I host a server co-located with NIXI Noida PoP (or any particular location) and connect to NIXI as a Content Provider, will my server be reachable from all over India?”

This question ended with an expectation for a response via email or a blog post. I thought a blog post here makes more sense because, honestly, I don’t know, and it would be fun to determine. While it’s known that ISPs announce regional routes only and hence any signal from NIXI would not have the complete Indian table, the question remains: do NIXI Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai have the complete table?

Defining Indian routing table

One can start by defining what forms the Indian routing table. We can begin by identifying ASNs that connect outside of India or to other ASNs which connect to outside of India (e.g AS4755-AS6453 pair, or AS55836-AS64049 pair etc). As far as I know, Airtel (AS9498), Tata Comm (AS4755), Jio (AS55836), Sify (AS9583), BSNL (AS9829), and Vodafone IDEA (AS55410, AS55644) primarily form the Indian table. I think it’s safe to say that all Indian networks are in the customer cone of these ASNs and hence these define the “Indian routing table”.

Lookup

Taking RIPE RIS RRRC01 and RRC03 as reference points and looking for downstream ASNs. Also, all these ASNs are only known to have downstreams in India, except Airtel (AS9498) and possibly Sify (AS9583). Airtel uses AS9498 outside of India for South Asia as well as African downstreams, and those downstreams do not form the “Indian routing table” and hence can be ignored from this lookup. For NIXI routes, we pick up “sh ip bgp” dumps from PCH daily snapshots.

Conclusion

This comparison gives me 234 Indian ASNs which are not visible at NIXI Delhi, Mumbai, or Chennai but are visible in the routing table behind Indian networks. Hence, the answer is - No! NIXI does not carry the complete Indian table for now, let alone the limited capacities of some of the networks over there. Since AS list itself is incomplete, I don’t see reason to match prefixes.

List of ASNs missing at Indian NIXI (Delhi+Mumbai+Chennai) - Click here.