Bdix

Earlier this month I got an opportunity to be part of IXP workshop in Kolkata. It was a 3-day event organised by ISOC Kolkata and supported by APNIC. There was also a workshop on DNSSEC and Champika Wijayatunga (from ICANN) was the instructor along with Anand Raje. It was a nice event and I come to know of other interesting projects ISOC Kolkata is doing like Indian IETF capacity building program apart from the IXP they are running in Kolkata. Mr Anupam Aggarwal and Anand showed the IX and it looks very good. I think it’s the first and only IX I know in India which is a real IX with proper policy. It’s an IX by a non-for-profit group, allows anyone to connect, a real layer 2 IX and welcomes anyone including ISPs, content players and root DNS servers. Presently IIFON-IX in Kolkata has few member ISPs besides the L root from ICANN and one of Verisign gTLD nodes (which host zones for .com, .net etc). I also saw a rack with some of Akamai CDN servers. This brings decent content right there. IX’es play an extremely important part of current internet infrastructure ecosystem. It’s very likely that content of this blog is travelling from my server to your browser from an Internet Exchange. :)  

So last month I had a wonderful trip to Bangladesh for bdNOG. This is bit delayed.  

Some thoughts on infrastructure

1. In terms of infrastructure - roads & traffic, power, quality of builds - it seemed like India in 2000’s.
2. Specifically roads and traffic was bit terrible and even as an Indian (who manages to drive in Indian traffic!) I still got scared out of traffic in Dhaka. Speeds, roughness and overtaking is pretty high.
3. There was no Uber and app based services are still pretty low. It was mostly usual “yellow taxi” which one had to call. (And it was expensive by local standards).
4. There was excessive, just excessive amounts of overhead cabling in Dhaka and most of key city areas. It’s worth noting that there is way more overhead fiber than India. I guess most of it was running “active ethernet” based solutions (not a PON).  Most was just via media converters on both ends.
5. I got 30Mbps speeds in cheap budget hotel in Dhaka which was more higher then what I have ever seen in India! (Speedtest here)
6. Bangladesh currently is connected to outside world via SEA-ME-WE4 (landing at Cox’s Bazaar) and a terrestrial cable route via Kolkata.
7. Overall network connectivity with India is decent since many large Bangladeshi networks buy transit from Tata Communications (AS6453) and Airtel (AS9498). So mostly there’s direct path to India and if not direct then via Singapore which added bit of latency but was not as bad as India-China routes.
8. Bangladesh has a real & functional internet exchange :)

   

Just finished with SANOG 26 conference and tutorials. It went very nice. Interestingly this time conference did not start early morning like it did in SANOG 24 at Noida. It was rather late in afternoon. Also, on very good note - there were less Govt. bureaucrats to bore attendees with usual stuff they always talk about but have very little idea. One specific interesting presentation was  Opportunities and Challenges for Broadband Wireless in India by Prof Abhay Karandikar (from IIT Mumbai). In start I felt it to be usual crappy 5G talk but later realized it was much more interesting. I loved the idea “Have 2Mbps everywhere static broadband and not some absurd number on mobile wireless broadband as we hear in case of 3G/4G. Although 2Mbps now is much slower and I would rather suggest that we target for 10Mbps everywhere (something which can be supported by copper/coax/fiber hybrid) but anyways it was nice refreshing talk. His thoughts were interesting but mostly impractical since had high dependence on useless project like NOFN. For the next part, we had a nice theme of keeping network simple which everyone kind of liked. Simplicity in Network Design & Deployments by Dany Pinto (from Colt) and Unified Forwarding with Segment Routing by Mohan Nanduri (from Microsoft Azure Cloud WAN team) were part of that. Santanu Dasgupta gave a presentation about Challenges of L2NID based Metro-E Architecture for vCPE/NFV Deployments and kind of confused everyone. :P