Bsnl
CANI SMC - Submarine cable connecting Andaman and Nicobar islands
Earlier in March I visited Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The trip was purely personal as my wife happened to have been born there. These are Indian islands in the Bay of Bengal located in the South East of West Bengal and geographically quite near Myanmar and Thailand. The nearest large Indian cities on the mainland are Kolkata and Chennai.
In the initial part of the trip, we stayed in Swaraj Dweep (old name Havelock islands) and later in Port Blair. The place is isolated and has amazing natural beauty. It has one of the most beautiful beaches in the world (Radhanagar Beach). Tourism has grown nicely in Andaman & Nicobar islands in recent years and besides many other factors, one of that is a submarine cable!
Facebook cache FNA updates - July 2022
As returning readers of this blog would be aware - I found a trick to find Facebook caching servers around the world during the APRICOT 2018 hackathon. Since then I am running my code again every year to see the changes and publish this report.
Previous reports
Facebook knows!
Back in 2019, I was in San Francisco, California for NANOG 75. While roaming around in the lobby, someone read the NANOG card hanging around my neck and greeted me. His 2nd line after greeting was “Oh I know that name, you are the guy who mapped our caching nodes” and we both laughed. I must say this specific category of the post has brought some attention around.
Why Indian internet traffic routes from outside of India?
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.
Missing IRINN route objects & outage!
A friend of mine buzzed me yesterday about his missing route objects. Later multiple other ISPs told the same story which triggered me to put this as a question on INNOG Mailing list. Many folks replied of missing route objects there and it seems to be limited to IRINN members only. I also asked the same question on APNIC mailing list and it was again confirmed about the issue.
Before I proceed further, here’s what it is all about.
Indian IPv6 deployment
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:
Indian telecom voice market and updates
Suddenly the voice market in India is becoming very interesting. Earlier it was the case of Jio (and competitors) launching unlimited voice plans and now it’s the case of Govt. of India permitting IP telephony. IP Telephony i.e networks where telephony happens over IP (not to be confused with IP to IP calls but) where IP to PSTN interconnects happen. Till a few months ago IP telephony (or IP-PSTN) interconnection was allowed only under certain conditions like doing it inside a building only for purpose of call centres (with OSP license) or running SIP trunks over private networks. Things like termination of calls originated from the apps was not allowed (where IP-PSTN was happening within India) as well as DID or Direct Inward Dialing numbers were not allowed. There were even cases where apps/businesses had to shut down due to confusing regulation. Here’s a nice article from Medianama about it. But all those were things of past. In May Wifi calling or calls via Wifi where wifi is used loosely and it’s essentially called via any sort of Internet connections were permitted (news here). Later after TRAI’s clarification it now has been formally allowed. While it may not look as attractive as it should have been in the age of WhatsApp calling (IP to IP, not PSTN mess involved!), it still is quite interesting and going to bring some major change.
Routing with North East India!
A few weeks back I got in touch with Marc from Meghalaya. He offered to host RIPE Atlas probe at Shillong and that’s an excellent location which isn’t there on RIPE Atlas coverage network yet. It took around 5 days for the probe to reach Shillong from Haryana. I think probably this probe is the one at the most beautiful place in India. :) Now that probe is connected, I thought to look into routing which is super exciting for far from places like Shillong. Marc has a BSNL FTTH connection & mentioned about not-so-good latency. Let’s trace to 1st IP of the corresponding /24 pool on which probe is hosted:
What makes BSNL AS9829 as most unstable ASN in the world?!
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.
Welcome to AWS Cloud Mumbai region
It’s great to see Amazon announcement two days back about launch of their region in Mumbai. In past I was quite happy to see their Cloudfront CDN PoPs in Mumbai & Chennai (blog post here). Now it’s just great to see a full AWS region out of Mumbai. :) Though it’s going to eat most of important customers from the smaller players still it’s good for industry as industry is too big and we need more & more of such large Cloud players in India to bring more and more content hosting in India.