AS9498

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

Post to determine whether or not NIXI carries full Indian routing table?

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.

After my last post about home networking, I am jumping back into global routing. More specifically how Indian traffic is hitting the globe when it does not need to. This is an old discussion across senior management folks in telcos, policymakers, and more. It’s about “Does Indian internet traffic routes from outside of India?” and if the answer is yes then “Why?” and “How much?”

It became a hot topic, especially after the Snowden leaks. There was even an advisory back in 2018 from Deputy National Security Advisor to ensure Indian internet traffic stays local (news here). Over time this has come up a few dozen times in my discussion with senior members from the Indian ISP community, individuals, and even latency-sensitive gamers. So I am going to document some of that part here. I am going to put whatever can be verified publically and going to avoid putting any private discussions I had with friends in these respective networks. The data specially traceroutes will have measurement IDs from RIPE Atlas so they can be independently verified by other network engineers.

I had calls with a couple of friends over this week and somehow discussion IPv6 deployment came up. “How much has been IPv6 deployment in India now in 2020” is a very interesting question. It’s often added with - “how much of my traffic will flow over IPv6 once it is enabled”?

 

Game of numbers

There is a drastic difference in IPv6 deployment depending on which statistic we are looking at here in India. There can be a bunch of factors based on which we can try to judge IPv6 deployment: