Airtel

I thought about this long back - “Who pays to whom in case of internet bandwidth?” I have been working in this domain from sometime and so far I have learnt that it’s really complex. I will try to put a series of blog post to give some thoughts on this subject. Firstly we have to understand that when we talk about “bandwidth price” it’s often layer 3 bandwidth which you buy in form of capacity over ethernet GigE, Ten-GigE and so on (or STMs if you are in India). As we know from back school class in networking - layer 3 works over layer 2 and so to deliver “bandwidth” on layer 3, one needs layer 2 physical circuit. Price paid by companies on layer 2 Vs layer 3 varies significantly based on their location, type of business, their target goal etc. E.g a content heavy company like Google pays hell lot of money on layer 2 circuits while it is strongly believed among networking community that Google is a tier 1 network and hence a “transit free” zone and they do not pay any amount on layer 3. In general the trend is pretty much as big networks have larger network footprint and connected “PoPs” over layer 2 (leading to a higher layer 2 bill) while relatively lower layer 3 bill while small networks depend significantly just on transit bandwidth (in form of layer3) and have very low layer 2 footprint.  

Earlier this month Dyn started with it’s Indian PoP. I came across news from Dyn’s blog post. It’s very good to see first Amazon AWS and now Dyn in India. With a warm welcome to Dyn let’s look at their Indian deployment.

Dyn using AS33517 which seems to be having upstream from Tata-VSNL AS4755 and Airtel AS9498. 

Dyn seems to be announcing 103.11.203.0/24 to both networks in Mumbai to transit. There are routes in global IPv4 routing table which show Tata & Airtel as transit for Dyn. It cannot be just a /24. I am sure there are more prefixes which are very likely locally announced. Since deployment is at Mumbai, let’s try to look at NIXI Mumbai for prefixes.We can see Tata AS4755 is using 218.100.48.85 and Airtel is using 218.100.48.86 from NIXI route server at Mumbai with simple “sh ip bgp sum” query. I tried taking entire table of Tata as well as of Airtel from NIXI route server but not able to get it beyond few thousand routes. 

And finally academic session over. Done with all vivas and related stuff. Next will be exams likely in June. Time for me to get ready for travel. :)   Anyways an interesting topic for today’s post - Google Public DNS. Lot of us are familier with popular (and free) DNS resolvers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I have covered reason in previous posts on why it tends to fail with Content Delivery networks like Akamai which rely on anycasting at bottom DNS layer and simple unicasting on application servers. Anycasted DNS nodes point to application servers based on various factors like distance, load, cost etc out of interesting algorithms these CDN networks use for load & cost management.   Anyways today’s post focus is not CDN issues with these resolvers but Google Public DNS itself. Are these servers located in India and everywhere else where Google has PoPs?   Let’s do a simple trace to get forward path from Airtel to Google’s 8.8.8.8:

Back in India after amazing APRICOT 2013 at Singapore. It was nice to stay in East Asia for a while and look around. :)

Anyways, issue for today - I have been using Airtel DNS servers from quite sometime since BSNL has crappy DNS while Google gives issues with Akamai while OpenDNS doesn’t has any node in India yet.  

Today I noticed a NXDOMAIN redirection for a non-working domain and later investigated. It seems like Airtel is hijacking on NXDOMAIN queries now.

Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend from Airtel after long time. For some strange reason discussion topic was changed to old statements from Bharti Airtel’s executives that companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc should pay to ISPs like Airtel for “data interconnection”. The argument goes more for Google then any other company. Statements from Airtel can be found here and here. 

The argument?

Companies like Airtel who have built a “physical infrastructure” feel that companies like Google should pay to them since they are putting so much of traffic on their networks. Airtel feels that services like YouTube take significant amount of bandwidth and thus requires and infrastructure from core, middle mile to edge part of network and all that needs significant investment. Similarly there was another argument from Mr Sunil Mittal about fact that Facebook is enjoying on top of infrastructure which ISPs like Airtel have created.