AS9498

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

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:

Since last week of Nov 2019, I am having serious issues with Airtel at my home. Somehow 4G signal SNR is very poor and most of the calls just fail on that. Airtel support just mentioned that they are putting a new site in my area in Jan 2020 but fail to explain why suddenly it went so bad. I can imagine that support team staff does not have visibility to network in real-time and likely it would be an issue with the 4G antenna on one or more towers. 2G signal was good but latency was extremely high to connect call plus calls still failed regardless (maybe due to high strain on 2G).

Last month I noticed quite high latency with Cisco’s OpenDNS from my home fibre connection. The provider at home is IAXN (AS134316) which is peering with content folks in Delhi besides transit from Airtel.

ping -c 5 208.67.222.222
PING 208.67.222.222 (208.67.222.222) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=4 ttl=51 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=5 ttl=51 time=103 ms
--- 208.67.222.222 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 103.377/103.593/103.992/0.418 ms

This is bit on the higher side as from Haryana to Mumbai (OpenDNS locations list here). My ISP is backhauling from Faridabad which is probably 6-8ms away from my city and 2-3ms further to Delhi and from there to Mumbai around 30ms. Thus latency should be around ~40-45ms.

And here goes first blog post of 2018. Last few months went busy with some major changes in personal life. :) I looked into Amazon’s India connectivity with various ASNs tonight. Here’s how it looks like. (Note: Jump to bottom most to skip traces and look at the summary data).  

 

Traceroutes

Amazon India to Vodafone India

traceroute to 118.185.107.1 (118.185.107.1), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1 ec2-52-66-0-128.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com (52.66.0.128) 21.861 ms ec2-52-66-0-134.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com (52.66.0.134) 19.244 ms 19.233 ms
 2 100.64.2.200 (100.64.2.200) 14.789 ms 100.64.0.200 (100.64.0.200) 20.731 ms 100.64.3.12 (100.64.3.12) 13.187 ms
 3 100.64.0.193 (100.64.0.193) 14.418 ms 100.64.3.69 (100.64.3.69) 15.469 ms 100.64.3.67 (100.64.3.67) 15.946 ms
 4 100.64.16.67 (100.64.16.67) 0.343 ms 100.64.17.165 (100.64.17.165) 0.312 ms 100.64.17.199 (100.64.17.199) 0.313 ms
 5 52.95.67.213 (52.95.67.213) 1.942 ms 52.95.67.209 (52.95.67.209) 1.967 ms 52.95.67.213 (52.95.67.213) 1.935 ms
 6 52.95.66.218 (52.95.66.218) 4.998 ms 4.694 ms 52.95.66.130 (52.95.66.130) 4.650 ms
 7 52.95.66.67 (52.95.66.67) 1.752 ms 52.95.66.89 (52.95.66.89) 1.850 ms 1.806 ms
 **8 52.95.217.183 (52.95.217.183) 3.111 ms 3.102 ms 3.088 ms <- Amazon India**
 **9 182.19.106.204 (182.19.106.204) 3.426 ms 4.547 ms 4.537 ms <- Vodafone India**
10 118.185.107.1 (118.185.107.1) 2.035 ms 2.059 ms 2.039 ms

 

On weekend  I was looking at BGP Instability Report data. As usual (and unfortunately) BSNL tops that list. BSNL is the most unstable autonomous network in the world. In past, I have written previously about how AS9829 is the rotten IP backbone.

This isn’t a surprise since they keep on coming on top but I think it’s well worth a check on what exactly is causing that. So I looked into BGP tables updates published on Oregon route-views from 21st May to 27th May and pulled data specifically for AS9829. I see zero withdrawals which are very interesting. I thought there would be a lot of announcements & withdrawals as they switch transits to balance traffic. If I plot the data, I get following chart of withdrawals against timestamp. This consists of summarised view of every 15mins and taken from 653 routing update dumps. It seems not feasible to graph data for 653 dumps, so I picked top 300.