India has been deploying large scale optical fiber to the rual areas under NOFN / BBNL. Overall the project is not well thought off and as have written previously about it - the choice of “Gram Panchayats” may not be the best option. Furthermore it’s a project about backhual/backbone fiber and not last mile. Project vaguely expects private sector to be doing last mile with no clear plans on how it would be executed.
As mentioned in part 1 of the post, this part contains the map of fibre point of interconnects for BBNL network. This is one of the interesting parts of the network and if executed well, it can be a really great middle mile. Though I haven’t seen any ground deployment as yet of the same. Will explore more in PoIs around my city. BBNL Fibre Point of Interconnect
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.
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.