Lately, I have been struggling to keep latency in check between my servers in India and Europe. Since Nov 2021 multiple submarine cables are down impacting significant capacity between Europe & India. The impact was largely on Airtel earlier but also happened on Tata Comm for a short duration. As of now Airtel is still routing traffic from Europe > India towards downstream networks via the Pacific route via EU > US East > US West > Singapore path.
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).
This Sunday I was looking at global routing table dump and found AS1 announcing some very weird prefixes.
AS1 i.e Autonomous System Number 1 belongs to Level3 but as far as I know they are not actively using it. They use AS3356 globally (along with Global Crossing’s AS3549). I noticed quite a few prefixes of a Brazil based telecom provider - Netvip Telecomunicaes being announced by AS1. Some of entries in global routing table belonging to AS1 (as picked from BGP table dump of route-views archive):
Quick analysis of BSNL-Level3 bad routing issue I can see BSNL having pretty high latency again with most of Europe again. It seems like they are using Level3 Communications AS 3356 along with Tata-VSNL for upstream. With Level3 transit BSNL has badly screwed up reverse path causing very high latency and awful bandwidth.
anurag@laptop:~$ ping server7 -c 5 PING server7.anuragbhatia.com (178.238.225.247) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from server7.anuragbhatia.com (178.238.225.247): icmp_req=1 ttl=52 time=320 ms 64 bytes from server7.