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A blog post dedicated to BSNL AS9829. It just tried so hard to become as irrelevant as it can from everyone’s life (and that doesn’t excludes me now).   So what really is BSNL btw?

• A Govt of India telco sitting at a extensive fiber of over 600,000 Kms across the country (staying just unused and unavailable for anyone’s use!)
• A telco which has an extensive last mile copper (which is very poorly maintained and barely works!)
• A backbone with over 200Gbps of IP transit capacity (which completely sucks due to rotten routing)
• An integrated telecom provider offering services from landline to DSL broadband, from leased line to datacenter services! (out of which everything fails miserably from product line to technical ground level operations)
• An extensive manpower (which is terribly arrogant and from top to ground level staff anyone barely works!)
• Although telecom industry just boomed, it went from 10,000 crore profits in 2004 to 8000 crore losses in 2015. And still politics goes around it!
• While private sector was busy with focus on 4G LTE deployment, BSNL’s market share dropped below 10% in 2014
• While private sector firms like Sterlite, Radius Infratel focused on FTTH rollouts, BSNL rolled out FTTH plans for 4000 INR/month for 50GB cap and FUP speed of (amazing) 512Kbps to ensure no one uses it
• While Reliance Jio is about to come, Airtel is extensively launching 4G LTE, cool companies like ACT are getting more investment, BSNL is putting 6000 crore in public wifi infrastructure to give few mins of free wifi and with hop of users paying it afterwards. (Wow?!)

All above tells nothing but ways in which BSNL is 100% screwed up for now. I don’t expect it to ever pick up again. Politically, technically, and fundamentally it’s a mess. I became BSNL broadband user in 2008 and it has been over 7 years of (painful and terrible) experience with them. As a company which put so much of infrastructure to connect India worked extremely hard to do as many stupid things as possible. For me trouble remained that in my city they were only wired telecom provider for retail services.   Last month I got a long haul circuit from Airtel (provisioned on fiber) between my city and a friend’s ISP PoP for 10Mbps bandwidth. Circuit is delivered at a Airtel BTS site location (slightly away from my home) and I have installed Microtik SXT Lite 5’s shooting link from there to my home (around 1km link with clear LoS). This is a usual long range fixed wireless RF link over un-licensed 5.8Ghz band. (Thankyou govt. of India for delicensing it in 2007 and making available for public use). Thanks to companies like Microtik and Ubiquiti for opening up world of good fixed wireless radios and antennas which really work great and are available for quite good prices. I got pair of SXT Lite5’s from Amazon.in at 7700 INR (~$116). Fortunately BTS site has a private WISP tower and the owner of tower agreed to let me use his tower for my radio for reasonable price.    

One of things which people often asked me around in past was on how to have multiple IPs on Linux machine under various circumstances. I know there are ton of blog posts about this but very few explain how it works and possible options under different use cases etc.   I will share router side and server side config with focus on how it should be done from server end. Assuming server side config to be for Ubuntu/Debian. You can find similar concept for CentOS.   Say you have a router on IP 10.10.10.1 and server on IP 10.10.10.2 on a /24 (255.255.255.0) subnet. Assming that entire 10.10.10.0/24 is available for server’s connectivity. Setup would be like: Configuration so far is super simple. You have got 10.10.10.1 placed on R1’s interface (g1/0) which connects to server01 and server01 has 10.10.10.2.

Today I met a good friend and he has recently moved back into Rohtak (like me!) and was crying over BSNL’s issues. He has issues of unstable DSL due to last mile and I told him that even if last mile works well, BSNL still has got ton of issues with their IP backbone traffic.   It’s Sunday late night out here in India and I am having really pathetic connectivity with just everywhere except Google. With Google only key difference I noted is that my TCP session to Google’s services is terminating at Mumbai and not Delhi anymore. First and formost, I did trace to spectranet.in (which is last company I was working for) to see how is my latency with server hosting it:

BCP38 - also known as “Network Ingress Filtering” is concept where we filter incoming packets from end customers and allow packets ONLY from IP’s assigned to them.   Before going to BCP38, let’s first understand how packets forwarding work:

Here User 1 is connected to User 2 via a series of router R1, R2 and R3. Here R1 and R3 are ISP’s edge routers while R2 is a core router. In typical way the network is setup, entire effort is given on logic of routing table i.e for packets to reach from User 1 to User 2, we need to ensure that User 1 has default route towards R1, knows that User-2’s IP is behind R3 which is reachable via R2. So path User 1 > R1 > R2 > R3 > User 2 comes up. And same for User 2 > R3 > R2 > R1 > User 1 as return path. Now e.g IP pool for User-1 is 192.168.1.0/24 and is using 192.168.1.2 out of it while IP pool for User-2 is 192.168.2.0/24 and is using 192.168.2.2 out of it.  

Just finished with SANOG 26 conference and tutorials. It went very nice. Interestingly this time conference did not start early morning like it did in SANOG 24 at Noida. It was rather late in afternoon. Also, on very good note - there were less Govt. bureaucrats to bore attendees with usual stuff they always talk about but have very little idea. One specific interesting presentation was  Opportunities and Challenges for Broadband Wireless in India by Prof Abhay Karandikar (from IIT Mumbai). In start I felt it to be usual crappy 5G talk but later realized it was much more interesting. I loved the idea “Have 2Mbps everywhere static broadband and not some absurd number on mobile wireless broadband as we hear in case of 3G/4G. Although 2Mbps now is much slower and I would rather suggest that we target for 10Mbps everywhere (something which can be supported by copper/coax/fiber hybrid) but anyways it was nice refreshing talk. His thoughts were interesting but mostly impractical since had high dependence on useless project like NOFN. For the next part, we had a nice theme of keeping network simple which everyone kind of liked. Simplicity in Network Design & Deployments by Dany Pinto (from Colt) and Unified Forwarding with Segment Routing by Mohan Nanduri (from Microsoft Azure Cloud WAN team) were part of that. Santanu Dasgupta gave a presentation about Challenges of L2NID based Metro-E Architecture for vCPE/NFV Deployments and kind of confused everyone. :P