It has been some time since I started pushing Indian community for hosting RIPE Atlas Probes. These probes are small devices designed to be hosted at end user’s connection and do pre-defined as well as user-defined measurement. Measurement includes ping, trace, DNS lookup, SSL check etc. Currently, there are 61 active RIPE Atlas probes. I would say it has +/- of 7-8 probes which go offline and come back online when I request hosts to check.
And breaking silence over here, last few months went quite busy. I travelled to Cambodia, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong recently for various tasks from APNIC’s IXP workshop in Cambodia to SGNOG in Singapore, APNIC 44 in Taiwan and so on. Apart from this, I went for solar power setup at home here in Haryana since grid has been quite unstable (specifically this year). I think the overall grid is OKish but it’s quite bad in my city due to the construction of an overhead road from where a high voltage line is crossing. That has lead to regular long outages in the area. I think in terms of formal load shedding things are getting better and I am certain Indian Govt. will be able to reach its target of 24 x 7 supply without any shedding before 2022. That would be the key part as we go for electric vehicles in India. But still, I think we won’t get a good stable grid for at least next 6-7 years. Checkout Vidyut Pravah website which gives an idea of load and demand across India. And here is data for Haryana.
Today I was having a chat with my friend Hari Haran. He mentioned that Facebook has started its PoP in Mumbai. This seems true and Facebook has mentioned GPX Mumbai as their private peering PoP in their peeringdb record.
I triggered a quick test trace to “www.facebook.com” on IPv4 from all Indian RIPE Atlas probes and resolved “www.facebook.com” on the probe itself. The lowest latency is from Airtel Karnataka and that’s still hitting Facebook in Singapore. I do not see any of networks with probe coverage hitting Facebook node locally.
India has a slum problem as many of us know. Slums are a serious problem and there’s just no easy way to fix them. One cannot just push thousands and thousands of people out while at the same time quality of life in slums is terrible. One thing which happens a lot in India is the fact that Govt. does nothing when slums are getting established and once they are established situation gets out of control.
Today BGPmon reported about possible BGP prefix hijack of Amazon’s IP address space. Amazon announces 50.16.0.0/16 from AS14618.
At 13:45:44 UTC / 19:15:44 IST D-Vois broadband started originating a more specific 50.16.226.0/24 in the table from AS45769. One of example AS_PATH of this announcement: 198290 197264 197264 197264 29467 1299 9583 45769 Clearly, this leak was carried over by AS9583 (Sify) to AS1299 (Telia) and was carried over to rest of internet from there. There was a visible withdrawal of this request by 14:17:37 UTC / 19:47:37 IST.
One of frequent email and contact form message I get my blog is about available content networks in India and where one can peer. There are certain content networks in India and of course most of the content networks have open peering policy and are usually happy with direct inter-connection (we call as “peering”) with the ISP networks (often referred to as “eyeball networks”). Some of these networks have a backbone which connects back to their key datacenter locations on their own circuits via Singapore/Europe, some other have simply placed their caching server where cache fill happens over IP transit. Based on publically known information across community and of course peeringdb, following content players are available in India and known to be open for peering:
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.
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.
RIPE NCC is running an excellent project called RIPE Atlas from few years. This is one of largest distributed network measurement projects where thousands of users host small devices called RIPE Atlas Probes on their networks, home connections, datacenters etc. These probes do measurement under both public and private category and make that data available publicly for use by network engineers and helps in optimizing routing. This page shows detailed coverage statistics of the probes.
Came across this impressive cover of last mile broadband issues in Orcas Island in Washington state in Arstechnica.com.
It’s very true on how so many areas are just not served and likely will never be served because when you have large telecom players bidding for billion dollar worth of Spectrum, all they care next for is very high value returns. And if they do not see those kind of returns, areas stay unserved. India has even poor story where it’s challenging to get wired broadband in most areas of country including key metro cities.