BSNL

It has been an interesting week at village - dry weather, (ultra) dry classes, (boring) external seminars and more of depressing environment but one can always find some hope out of such depressing environment. Overall life here is colourful but one just needs to lookout for colours. :)   One interesting case to report today - F root server has quite bad connectivity in India. Last week a friend asked me for traceroutes to all root servers and here’s what I saw when I did traceroute for F root from BSNL connection:

It has been super boring evening considering my sessional tests tomorrow. Test time is dull as always. I have been precisely measnuring latency on BSNL link from BSNL Haryana to Singapore based servers. The fluctuation in latency is pretty much common now. Someones we get 120ms latency to Singapore (an expected number based on distance) while other time it goes off as high as 310ms. Latency with openDNS nodes in Singapore makes it pretty much poor to use openDNS here.   Based on my collected data and BGPlay’s routing records, here’s what’s happening. My IP is coming /20 BGP annoucement from BSNL Autonomous System 9829 - 117.207.48.0/20. Looking at BGP table records for that block from BGPlay’s routing data archive source.

Yesterday I read about BSNL increasing speeds from 512Kbps to 1Mbps (with caps). Today I came across news in Business Line about Bharti Airtel increasing speed on wireline DSL. This is really good believe me! I am not refering to little bit increase in speeds, but I am refering to start of competition within ISP’s based on speed. Right now it’s Wireless (3G) Vs Wireline (DSL) players, and I am sure very soon we will see competition within wireline Vs wireline players. Competition is always good specially in telecom industry. We can clearly see where we stand now: from 8years of waiting for a telephone connection to 5min of prepaid sim purchase, from 56Kbps at $1/hour to 10GB data at $20 a month. We have came so far, but yet long way to go!

Today, I was reading New Telecom Policy from Dept. of Telecom. Must say I am disappointed. Everyday I hear a new story on 3G & LTE in India. About wireless we all know that due to super limited spectrum, it’s good only smartphones. Hard to call even LTE as an alternate even to DSL. LTE has yet to come, but still it will hardly compete with DSL in tier 3 cities and rural India. For tier 1 cities like Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and tier 2 cities like Gurgaon, Jaipur - broadband still suffers badly and we all know but just not accepting that wireless broadband is not way out to that. I am not against wireless broadband. I totally agree to fact that for mass deployment wireless is way to go but I strongly feel that another serious effort is needed in wired broadband connectivity. I am happy to get 2Mbps connection via 3G on my Idea cellular phone, and I don’t really complain for it’s cost because of spectrum crunch and all but I feel super surprised on fact that I get 512Kbps capped broadband on DSL when technically it can go over 16Mbps easily. It’s hard to comment on how well fiber connections to Gram Panchayats will perform. All we can say it’s good and nice initiative given they don’t create parallel infrastructure. But why Govt. is missing out demand in big cities where wired infrastructure is “decent” or can be made decent (based on demand)? I don’t see any good efforts being made by Govt. for improving broadband speeds or connectivity by making maximum use of existing copper infrastructure. Working professionals in cities like Gurgaon/Chennai still suffer badly for “decent” broadband while most of them could have given broadband - demand & technology - both of things are there. Just missing willingness on side of Govt. What’s point in FTTH now which “can” give 1Gbps speed given one is ready to pay ~$1500 a month for that sort of speeds?  

Seems like BSNL-NIB (AS9829) routing with Softlayer’s Singapore datacenter (AS36351) is messed up. Example route between BSNL consumer connection (from Haryana, India) to Softlayer hosted site dot19.com

1 router2 (192.168.1.100) [AS8151/AS28513] 3.136 ms 3.874 ms 4.675 ms
2 117.200.48.1 (117.200.48.1) [AS9829] 29.088 ms 32.395 ms 35.773 ms
3 218.248.173.42 (218.248.173.42) [AS9829] 42.411 ms 44.746 ms 47.176 ms
4 218.248.255.70 (218.248.255.70) [AS9829] 92.977 ms 95.322 ms 97.758 ms
5 64.213.76.69 (64.213.76.69) [AS3043] 323.921 ms 324.594 ms 327.478 ms
6 ix-20-0.tcore2.LVW-LosAngeles.as6453.net (209.58.53.9) [AS6453] 333.339 ms 302.673 ms 303.992 ms
7 if-8-2-1-0.tcore1.PDI-PaloAlto.as6453.net (64.86.252.114) [AS6453] 419.641 ms 423.086 ms 424.411 ms
8 if-2-2.tcore2.PDI-PaloAlto.as6453.net (66.198.127.2) [AS6453] 425.475 ms 426.956 ms 430.239 ms
9 if-9-2.tcore1.TV2-Tokyo.as6453.net (180.87.180.18) [*] 436.026 ms 433.594 ms 434.911 ms
10 180.87.180.50 (180.87.180.50) [*] 439.543 ms 438.330 ms 441.001 ms
11 ae7.bbr01.eq01.tok01.networklayer.com (50.97.18.162) [AS36351] 471.290 ms 446.401 ms 472.233 ms
12 ae1.bbr01.eq01.sng02.networklayer.com (50.97.18.165) [AS36351] 477.914 ms 480.721 ms 485.605 ms
13 ae5.dar01.sr03.sng01.networklayer.com (50.97.18.197) [AS36351] 499.273 ms 502.262 ms 501.499 ms
14 po1.fcr01.sr03.sng01.networklayer.com (174.133.118.131) [AS36351] 489.251 ms po2.fcr01.sr03.sng01.networklayer.com (174.133.118.133) [AS36351] 496.491 ms 497.322 ms
15 * * *
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * * *

Messed up routing tables of BSNL or lack of co-ordination between Tata Comm & Softlayer?