Just came across this brilliant talk by my friend Bert Hubert. It covers so nicely about the mad rush to just outsource everything and how innovation is lost. While he mentioned names of EU telcos in examples, unfortunately situation isn’t that different in this side of world either. Operator in South Asia also very much suffer with this problem.
Slides of this presentation are here.
I thought about this long back - “Who pays to whom in case of internet bandwidth?” I have been working in this domain from sometime and so far I have learnt that it’s really complex. I will try to put a series of blog post to give some thoughts on this subject. Firstly we have to understand that when we talk about “bandwidth price” it’s often layer 3 bandwidth which you buy in form of capacity over ethernet GigE, Ten-GigE and so on (or STMs if you are in India). As we know from back school class in networking - layer 3 works over layer 2 and so to deliver “bandwidth” on layer 3, one needs layer 2 physical circuit. Price paid by companies on layer 2 Vs layer 3 varies significantly based on their location, type of business, their target goal etc. E.g a content heavy company like Google pays hell lot of money on layer 2 circuits while it is strongly believed among networking community that Google is a tier 1 network and hence a “transit free” zone and they do not pay any amount on layer 3. In general the trend is pretty much as big networks have larger network footprint and connected “PoPs” over layer 2 (leading to a higher layer 2 bill) while relatively lower layer 3 bill while small networks depend significantly just on transit bandwidth (in form of layer3) and have very low layer 2 footprint.
Some free time here in Europe and thus time for another quick blog post & to take my mind away from depressing people!
One of impressive features of major European networks is support for BGP communities. In India it’s almost non-existent. Setting it up isn’t hard technically but from capacity management side, Indian ISPs are somewhat shy in setting it up.
Let’s put a case where we have a Customer router (R1 with AS1), upstream of customer (R2 with AS2), upstream of upstream (R3 with AS3), peer of upstream (R4 with router4). Let’s try to setup communities so that customer at AS1 can control his BGP announcements and announce some prefixes to AS3 and some to AS4 selectively to control inbound traffic flow.