Airtel

And here goes my first post for 2017. The start of this year did not go well as I broke my hand in Jan and that resulted in a lot of time loss. Now I am almost recovered and in much better condition. I just attended HKNOG 4.0 at Hong Kong followed by APRICOT 2017 at Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. an event and I enjoyed the both. Here’s my presentation from APRICOT 2017. I recently I came across some of crazy confusing traceroutes as passed by one of my friends. I cannot share that exact traceroute on this blog post but can produce the same effect about which I am posting by doing a trace from one of large network like Telia London PoP to one of the Indian destinations via their looking glass

One of frequent email and contact form message I get my blog is about available content networks in India and where one can peer. There are certain content networks in India and of course most of the content networks have open peering policy and are usually happy with direct inter-connection (we call as “peering”) with the ISP networks (often referred to as “eyeball networks”). Some of these networks have a backbone which connects back to their key datacenter locations on their own circuits via Singapore/Europe, some other have simply placed their caching server where cache fill happens over IP transit. Based on publically known information across community and of course peeringdb, following content players are available in India and known to be open for peering:

K root in Noida seems to be not getting enough traffic from quite sometime and connectivity does seems bit broken. This is a blog post following up to Dyn’s excellent and detailed post about how TIC leaked the world famous 193.0.14.0/24 address space used by AS25152. It was good to read this post from RIPE NCC written by my friend Emile (and thanks to him for crediting me to signal about traffic hitting outside!)  

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.    

Yesterday I was driving and radio was pretty boring. Next, I connected cell phone to car’s stereo (I use a PT-750 to wirelessly connected my devices to car’s audio system). Next I tuned into Gaana.com app and experience was overall good. The way whole setup was working itself is a wonder - wireless profiles keeping layer 3 link (IP address of device) consistent and handovers happening on layer 1. On top of that a while world of backbone routing across AS9498 backbone the hosting provider’s network of the app. Now an interesting thing in this setup was the IP allocations. I that IP allocated by Airtel was 100.92.215.253.