Posts

APRICOT 2023 | Network Automation | APNIC Hackathon

Anurag Bhatia
Next month will be APRICOT 2023 which is exciting. The last in-person event of such kind was in Feb 2020 in Melbourne. Later APRICOT 2021 & 2022 were completely online (similar to other NOGs). This year’s APRICOT will be in Manila, Philippines. On the agenda will be meetings with network operators, CDNs and internet exchanges in the region. Along with that, I will be doing a 5-day long workshop on “Network Automation for Network Engineers”.

EV battery replacement fine print

Anurag Bhatia
More and more EVs (Electric Vehicles) are visible on the road as time is passing. On two-wheelers, it’s getting quite common. I don’t have sales stats but I can see as many as 1-2 scooters are electric out of 10 in the area. In cars, it’s still uncommon but one can see a few Tata Nexon EV and Toyota with green number plates when driving around in Delhi, besides many parked electric cars at terminal 3 in Delhi airport parking.

Mapping major CDNs across Indian networks

Anurag Bhatia
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.

Understanding earthing/grounding

Anurag Bhatia
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.

OTT and paid peering

Anurag Bhatia
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.