Tag Archives: Broadband

19 Apr

India – Bangladesh bandwidth agreement, BSNL routing & more!

Last month India & Bangladesh went into an agreement for power and bandwidth. India stated export of an additional 100MW of power to Bangladesh while Bangladesh started a 10Gbps link to Indian state of Tripura. (News article on this here)
Tripura
 
Tripura is a Indian state having its boundaries with Bangladesh as you can see in above map. Coming to routing side of things setup is that BSNL (AS9829) is buying IP transit from Bangladesh Submarine Cable Co. Ltd (BSCCL) at $1.2 million / year. This means a cost of around $10/Mbps/month or 662Rs/Mbps/month. It’s hard to say if it’s good or bad since other link from BSNL is via it’s other links. But yes it’s good to see a layer 3 connectivity in terms of IP transit relationship rather then leasing dark fiber or L1 waves as they would have caused bit inefficient routing in the area. In order to do this BSNL has setup a “gateway node” at Agartala. I think it would be pretty much a node with approvals under ILD from doT and extremely likely a LIM device for lawful interception.
 
Months before it actually came up, Dyn research tweeted about this visible routing relationship.
 

Thanks to Dyn for headsup on this! 🙂
 
Coming to setup today, here are all visible prefixes of BSNL (AS9829) behind BSCCL (AS132602):

111.223.20.0/22
117.198.48.0/20
117.198.64.0/20
117.198.64.0/21
117.199.64.0/20
117.201.112.0/20
117.203.144.0/20
117.203.160.0/20
117.203.176.0/20
117.214.32.0/20
117.214.96.0/20
117.245.48.0/20
117.247.128.0/20
117.248.168.0/22
117.253.48.0/20
137.59.128.0/22
59.93.176.0/22
59.93.188.0/22
59.94.80.0/20
59.97.132.0/24
59.97.133.0/24
59.99.48.0/22

 
That’s quite a lot of address space but anyways that is what BSNL is known for. 🙂
As per our bgp.he.net tool, this is around 6% of total routes announced by BSNL. You can see our report about BSNL AS9829 here – http://bgp.he.net/AS9829
 
Disclaimer: This post is in my personal capacity and has nothing to do with my employer.

03 Nov

Last mile broadband technology for PRESENT!

Came across this impressive cover of last mile broadband issues in Orcas Island in Washington state in Arstechnica.com. It’s very true on how so many areas are just not served and likely will never be served because when you have large telecom players bidding for billion dollar worth of Spectrum, all they care next for is very high value returns. And if they do not see those kind of returns, areas stay unserved. India has even poor story where it’s challenging to get wired broadband in most areas of country including key metro cities.
 
Few months back I posted story of my home fixed wireless connection and it works great. Sharing video story of Orcas Island citizens about their broadband issues and how they fixed them with fixed wireless. This is a technology which is already somewhat used and needs to be used right away for most of less populated areas and villages. It’s not fiber but yes it makes much more economical sense to get more people with 30-40Mbps symmetric pipes right away rather than waiting for years and years for fiber connection (and paying a hefty $5 billion on a project like NOFN/BBNL) or worst – giving people fiber connections with 5-10Mbps of plans!
 

 
 
Oh and btw I would be presenting a small research work at bdNOG 4 next week in Bangladesh. Meet and greet if you are around in Bangladesh attending the event!