India

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:

Last week I visited Delhi and spent some time at the “Regulating for Inclusion” workshop. I usually do not attend non-NOG events but this one seemed interesting and was relatively easy to attend as was in Delhi.

 

Discussion on backhaul

There is quite a bit of talk as well as focus on the backhaul capacity but somehow discussion missed a very important element of the picture - Internet Exchange Points (IXP). Unless we have a vibrant number of exchanges and a broad sense to build & promote exchanges, we cannot really tap the Gig capacity of modern fibre to the home systems. In the absence of IXPs, we would end up in having a large part of interconnection in Mumbai, Chennai (and possibly Delhi, though Noida seems to be the case instead of Delhi). Imagine the amount of backhaul capacity we would need on the middle mile in these cases. Furthermore, traffic going out of region reduces the resiliency of the overall system in case of high-stress periods of natural disaster etc.

In March 2018 I mapped nodes of Facebook globally using the airport string they use in the CDN URLs (detailed post here). Since then I posted a couple of times updates on as they are adding more nodes. There also have been questions via emails and comments on the blog in recent times about updated data.

Here goes latest data as on 22 Nov 2019. It’s published here.

 

Global stats

• Total nodes increased from 2204 as from Aug 2018 to 3184 now in Nov 2019.

(A very Indian specific post, International readers feel free to skip this one!)

From last month Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 came to existence. It increases fines for various violations a lot more then what it used to be. I don’t need to cover what has changed since it has been extensively covered in various news articles. One can refer to the Times of India article here which has a nice comparison of old Vs new fine.

This week I worked on the paperwork to get on the board of E2E Networks as one of the Independent Director. It was quite an interesting process as this is the first time I am joining the board of directors of an organisation.

 

About E2E

Not to be confused by the “Networks” in the name, E2E is in the business of selling high powered, low cost compute (Virtual machines) hosted in India targeted towards Indian organisations. It’s one of the very few organisations of its kind which is listed at the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) since 15th May 2018. E2E was started by Tarun Dua and Mohammed Imran. I know Tarun since a really long time (if I remember correctly, probably since 2010). It has been good to see the organisation grow from a very small team to where it stands now. While AWS, Azure and now Google Cloud are helping to grow the market of Cloud Computing, there’s still a gap of providers who can offer much more competitive pricing for the monster machines for lesser overbuild which large cloud providers do.