Airtel

Analying impact of Airtel’s routing between India & Europe since 8th December 2024.

This posts covers a quick analysis of Airtel’s recent interconnection at MSK-IX in Moscow, Russia

Earlier in March I visited Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The trip was purely personal as my wife happened to have been born there. These are Indian islands in the Bay of Bengal located in the South East of West Bengal and geographically quite near Myanmar and Thailand. The nearest large Indian cities on the mainland are Kolkata and Chennai.

In the initial part of the trip, we stayed in Swaraj Dweep (old name Havelock islands) and later in Port Blair. The place is isolated and has amazing natural beauty. It has one of the most beautiful beaches in the world (Radhanagar Beach). Tourism has grown nicely in Andaman & Nicobar islands in recent years and besides many other factors, one of that is a submarine cable!

I visited Delhi earlier today and noticed latency from my phone on Jio 5G to my home (on an ISP behind Airtel) was just 20ms. It varied a bit (as one would expect on a wireless radio network) but 20ms is special because until now it was at least 80-90ms. After all, Jio and Airtel were not connected in Delhi NCR until now. There were sometimes jokes about them being connected at NIXI Noida but that never pushed any traffic because NIXI injects its route server AS24029 in the AS_PATH and while their direct PNIs (i.e Private Network Interconnect) in Mumbai & Chennai would have a direct (short) AS_PATH.

As returning readers of this blog would be aware - I found a trick to find Facebook caching servers around the world during the APRICOT 2018 hackathon. Since then I am running my code again every year to see the changes and publish this report.

Previous reports

1. March 2018 here
2. Nov 2019 here
3. April 2021 here

Facebook knows!

Back in 2019, I was in San Francisco, California for NANOG 75. While roaming around in the lobby, someone read the NANOG card hanging around my neck and greeted me. His 2nd line after greeting was “Oh I know that name, you are the guy who mapped our caching nodes” and we both laughed. I must say this specific category of the post has brought some attention around.