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I am in Chiang Mai, Thailand for APNIC 48 conference. Earlier today attended APIX meeting where many IX members from Asian community gave an update including NIXI i.e National Internet Exchange of India.

As per the update NIXI now allows content players to peer at the exchange. NIXI earlier had a strict requirement of telecom license for anyone to peer but as of now it allows anyone with IP address and AS number to be part of the exchange just like all other exchanges. This is a really good development coming this year after their announcement of the removal of x-y charge. One strange thing remains that their website is still not updated to reflect that which is probably just work in progress. As per representative from NIXI they now openly welcome all content players to peer at NIXI.

Attending SANOG 34 in Kolkata and today Champika from ICANN mentioned about how they (LKNOG) is trying to promote local participation by keeping the event free for locals. That is great if they can manage that. As he finished, I went to the microphone and suggested that whether or not such NOG (Network Operator Group) events are free for local operators but they must be kept free for students. I was part of INNOG 2 which happened recently and we kept the event free for the students.

Frugal living

Over the last few years, I have been travelling quite a bit as part of my job at Hurricane Electric. One of the discussions which come up regularly is “When did you arrive?” or “Where are you staying?” or “How many connections you had in your flight?” and whenever I answer such questions to my friends, I get a surprising look. I personally never understand the surprise about it but somehow it comes so often that I decided to blog and document my reply here so I can pass the link next time instead of explaining. :)

And it’s less than a week before the INNOG 2 i.e Indian Network Operators Group Conference 2. We (Indians) are little late to start a NOG but it’s finally working out and this is the 2nd event. First one happened last year.

Event website: www.innog.net

 

Why INNOG is important and why we should care?

Well, having a functional NOG is as important for local community as a working Internet Exchange Point. In absence of either people just start peering outside for an expensive price. There a lot of things which Indian Network Operators need to work on and without knowledge sharing that’s just not going to happen.

This week I worked on the paperwork to get on the board of E2E Networks as one of the Independent Director. It was quite an interesting process as this is the first time I am joining the board of directors of an organisation.

 

About E2E

Not to be confused by the “Networks” in the name, E2E is in the business of selling high powered, low cost compute (Virtual machines) hosted in India targeted towards Indian organisations. It’s one of the very few organisations of its kind which is listed at the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) since 15th May 2018. E2E was started by Tarun Dua and Mohammed Imran. I know Tarun since a really long time (if I remember correctly, probably since 2010). It has been good to see the organisation grow from a very small team to where it stands now. While AWS, Azure and now Google Cloud are helping to grow the market of Cloud Computing, there’s still a gap of providers who can offer much more competitive pricing for the monster machines for lesser overbuild which large cloud providers do.

Last month I noticed quite high latency with Cisco’s OpenDNS from my home fibre connection. The provider at home is IAXN (AS134316) which is peering with content folks in Delhi besides transit from Airtel.

ping -c 5 208.67.222.222
PING 208.67.222.222 (208.67.222.222) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=4 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=5 ttl=51 time=103 ms
--- 208.67.222.222 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 103.377/103.593/103.992/0.418 ms

This is bit on the higher side as from Haryana to Mumbai (OpenDNS locations list here). My ISP is backhauling from Faridabad which is probably 6-8ms away from my city and 2-3ms further to Delhi and from there to Mumbai around 30ms. Thus latency should be around ~40-45ms.

(Warning: Post is about Indian politics and International readers can likely skip the post unless interested in Indian politics)

After the recent announcement of General Elections as well as tensions on relations with Pakistan, the whole environment is getting so political. News channels are full of people screaming about the party, the leader they support while the level of discourse has got to a very low level.

I must admit I was much more excited about elections back in 2014 as compared to now and I feel that is the case with many other people around me.

It’s kind of fun times in India with many IX’es showing up and now NIXI finally removing their traffic wise charge.

I came across this email which they sent to their member networks recently:

From: I X <[ix@nixi.in](mailto:ix@nixi.in)\>  
Sent: Thu, 21 Feb 2019 12:48:31 GMT+0530  
To: "members " <[members@nixi.in](mailto:members@nixi.in)\>  
Cc: "[ceo@nixi.in](mailto:ceo@nixi.in)" <[ceo@nixi.in](mailto:ceo@nixi.in)\>  
Subject: Change in Data Transfer Charges (X-Y)  

Dear Members,  
  
In reference to the Board's direction to reduce the current data transfer (X-Y) charges from Re. 1/GB to Rs. 0/GB. The said reduction in X-Y charges to Rs. 0/GB is being implemented with effect from 1st March 2019. 
This is for your kind information please.  
  
Thanks & Regards.  
National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI)  
[www.nixi.in](http://www.nixi.in/)

 

Attending NANOG 75 in San Francisco. I have always found NANOG very fascinating w.r.t the size of event and a fact that internet started in this side of world.

Yesterday was day 0 with Hackathon and task was network automation with ZTP, Ansible, Open/R for IGP etc. 😄

 

Our team’s presentation about it:

India has been deploying large scale optical fiber to the rual areas under NOFN / BBNL. Overall the project is not well thought off and as have written previously about it - the choice of “Gram Panchayats” may not be the best option. Furthermore it’s a project about backhual/backbone fiber and not last mile. Project vaguely expects private sector to be doing last mile with no clear plans on how it would be executed.