Bsnl

Last month India & Bangladesh went into an agreement for power and bandwidth. India stated export of an additional 100MW of power to Bangladesh while Bangladesh started a 10Gbps link to Indian state of Tripura. (News article on this here)

Tripura is an Indian state having its boundaries with Bangladesh as you can see in above map. Coming to routing side of things setup is that BSNL (AS9829) is buying IP transit from Bangladesh Submarine Cable Co. Ltd (BSCCL) at $1.2 million / year. This means a cost of around $10/Mbps/month or 662Rs/Mbps/month. It’s hard to say if it’s good or bad since other link from BSNL is via it’s other links. But yes it’s good to see a layer 3 connectivity in terms of IP transit relationship rather then leasing dark fiber or L1 waves as they would have caused bit inefficient routing in the area. In order to do this BSNL has setup a “gateway node” at Agartala. I think it would be pretty much a node with approvals under ILD from doT and extremely likely a LIM device for lawful interception.   Months before it actually came up, Dyn research tweeted about this visible routing relationship.  

A blog post dedicated to BSNL AS9829. It just tried so hard to become as irrelevant as it can from everyone’s life (and that doesn’t excludes me now).   So what really is BSNL btw?

• A Govt of India telco sitting at a extensive fiber of over 600,000 Kms across the country (staying just unused and unavailable for anyone’s use!)
• A telco which has an extensive last mile copper (which is very poorly maintained and barely works!)
• A backbone with over 200Gbps of IP transit capacity (which completely sucks due to rotten routing)
• An integrated telecom provider offering services from landline to DSL broadband, from leased line to datacenter services! (out of which everything fails miserably from product line to technical ground level operations)
• An extensive manpower (which is terribly arrogant and from top to ground level staff anyone barely works!)
• Although telecom industry just boomed, it went from 10,000 crore profits in 2004 to 8000 crore losses in 2015. And still politics goes around it!
• While private sector was busy with focus on 4G LTE deployment, BSNL’s market share dropped below 10% in 2014
• While private sector firms like Sterlite, Radius Infratel focused on FTTH rollouts, BSNL rolled out FTTH plans for 4000 INR/month for 50GB cap and FUP speed of (amazing) 512Kbps to ensure no one uses it
• While Reliance Jio is about to come, Airtel is extensively launching 4G LTE, cool companies like ACT are getting more investment, BSNL is putting 6000 crore in public wifi infrastructure to give few mins of free wifi and with hop of users paying it afterwards. (Wow?!)

All above tells nothing but ways in which BSNL is 100% screwed up for now. I don’t expect it to ever pick up again. Politically, technically, and fundamentally it’s a mess. I became BSNL broadband user in 2008 and it has been over 7 years of (painful and terrible) experience with them. As a company which put so much of infrastructure to connect India worked extremely hard to do as many stupid things as possible. For me trouble remained that in my city they were only wired telecom provider for retail services.   Last month I got a long haul circuit from Airtel (provisioned on fiber) between my city and a friend’s ISP PoP for 10Mbps bandwidth. Circuit is delivered at a Airtel BTS site location (slightly away from my home) and I have installed Microtik SXT Lite 5’s shooting link from there to my home (around 1km link with clear LoS). This is a usual long range fixed wireless RF link over un-licensed 5.8Ghz band. (Thankyou govt. of India for delicensing it in 2007 and making available for public use). Thanks to companies like Microtik and Ubiquiti for opening up world of good fixed wireless radios and antennas which really work great and are available for quite good prices. I got pair of SXT Lite5’s from Amazon.in at 7700 INR (~$116). Fortunately BTS site has a private WISP tower and the owner of tower agreed to let me use his tower for my radio for reasonable price.    

Today I met a good friend and he has recently moved back into Rohtak (like me!) and was crying over BSNL’s issues. He has issues of unstable DSL due to last mile and I told him that even if last mile works well, BSNL still has got ton of issues with their IP backbone traffic.   It’s Sunday late night out here in India and I am having really pathetic connectivity with just everywhere except Google. With Google only key difference I noted is that my TCP session to Google’s services is terminating at Mumbai and not Delhi anymore. First and formost, I did trace to spectranet.in (which is last company I was working for) to see how is my latency with server hosting it:

Today I came across a nicely written article in Business Standard on NOFN. Article’s title was “NOFN: A distant dream”. I must say it is one of good articles I have seen so far on the topic and most of other articles appeared to be factually incorrect and more like Press Releases of UPA.  

Some key points from the Business Standard article:

According to a top official at the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), the project was conceptualised without a proper study. “NOFN would connect 2.5 lakh villages from the block level. But, no study was done on the details on optic fibre still the Block level, and how healthy those fibres are. Experts say that the NOFN project does not include service offering. It is just about the laying of optic fibres. For end-to-end services, service providers will have to set up their own infrastructure at the gram panchayat level. While the initial cost was projected at Rs 20,000 crore for the NOFN project, private companies will need to pump in much more than this amount to offer services to end customers.

Today I noticed some traffic on my blog from a link from Broadband forum. 

Here’s what poster wrote:

I made a thread a few days ago complaining about BSNL’s horrible routing. Well it looks like it has been fixed. I thank all the guys who made efforts to bring this to BSNL’s notice. Especially Anurag Bhatia who highlighted the issue with much detail on his blog

Softlayer connectivity problem and possible fix.

It’s late night here in India. I am having final 8th semester exams and as usual really bored! 

Though this time we have interesting subjects but still syllabus is pretty boring spreading across multiple books, notes and pdf’s. Anyways I will be out of college after June which sounds good.

Tonight, I found a routing glitch. Yes a routing glitch!! :)

These issues somehow keep my life in orbit and give a good understanding on how routing works over the Internet.

Just was looking at routing tables of BSNL. They have a significant address space in /10 - 117.192.0.0/10. Overall this /10 address space is divided into /18 and /20 subnets.

Let’s pick two of such subnets and observe routing tables from route-views:

1. 117.192.0.0/18
2. 117.192.0.0/20 

Routing table for 117.192.0.0/18: 

* 117.192.0.0/18 193.0.0.56 0 3333 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 194.85.102.33 0 3277 3216 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 194.85.40.15 0 3267 174 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 129.250.0.11 6 0 2914 6453 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 128.223.253.10 0 3582 3701 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 4.69.184.193 0 0 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 209.124.176.223 0 101 101 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 69.31.111.244 3 0 4436 2914 6453 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 207.46.32.34 0 8075 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 66.59.190.221 0 6539 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 12.0.1.63 0 7018 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 208.74.64.40 0 19214 2828 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 203.181.248.168 0 7660 2516 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 66.185.128.48 111 0 1668 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 134.222.87.1 0 286 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 157.130.10.233 0 701 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 114.31.199.1 0 0 4826 6939 1299 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 89.149.178.10 10 0 3257 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 154.11.98.225 0 0 852 3561 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 202.249.2.86 0 7500 2497 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 154.11.11.113 0 0 852 3561 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 144.228.241.130 0 1239 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 217.75.96.60 0 0 16150 1299 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 207.172.6.20 0 0 6079 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 206.24.210.102 0 3561 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 195.66.232.239 0 5459 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 208.51.134.254 2523 0 3549 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 207.172.6.1 0 0 6079 3356 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 216.218.252.164 0 6939 1299 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 203.62.252.186 0 1221 4637 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
*> 66.110.0.86 0 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 164.128.32.11 0 3303 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i  
* 202.232.0.2 0 2497 6453 4755 9829 9829 9829 i

Routing table for 117.192.0.0/20:

Finally back in village location.

Was just looking around and saw BSNL having really crazy routing. I looked around and saw this:

NIXI Looking Glass - show ip bgp neighbors 218.100.48.15 routes

Router: NIXI Delhi (Noida)

Command: show ip bgp neighbors 218.100.48.15 routes

Total number of prefixes 0

Clearly BSNL is NOT announcing any prefix at NIXI Delhi at all. Thus if one has to send packets to BSNL in North area either it will be via transit (Tata/VSNL) or via any other peering NIXI exchange in Mumbai or Chennai.

An interesting evening here in village. From today sessional tests started at college and so does my blog posts too (to keep myself with positive energy!) ;)

 

Learned something new while troubleshooting. :)

I am used to getting latency of ~350ms with my server in Europe as I have mentioned in my past blog posts.

My connection > Server goes direct but return path goes via US and this is what increases latency. Today all of sudden I saw latency of 200ms with my server. 150ms less - that’s significant.

These days Open DNS resolvers are getting quite popular. With Open DNS resolver I mean resolvers including OpenDNS as well as Google Public DNS.

One of major issues these resolvers suffer is failure of integration with CDN providers like Akamai, Limelight etc. In this post I will analyse sample client site of Akamai - Malaysia Airlines website - http://www.malaysiaairlines.com.  

Looking at OpenDNS, Google Public DNS and my ISP (BSNL’s) DNS resolver for its DNS records: