Peering

Fest time at college - Good since I get lot of free time to spend around looking at routing tables. It’s always interesting since last week was full of some major submarine cable cuts and has huge impact on Indian networks.

Anyways, an interesting issue to post today about Global IPv6 routing . There are “dark spots” in global IPv6 routing because of peering dispute between multiple tier 1 ISPs involving Hurricane Electric (AS6939) & Cogent Communications (AS174).  What’s happening here is that both tier 1 providers failed to reach on agreement to keep peering up in case of IPv6. This has resulted in parts of global IPv6 internet where packets from one network (and it’s downstream) can’t reach other network or their downsteam singled hommed networks. 

A quick blog post on a interesting issue coming up due to combined problem of CDN failure on Google Public DNS and bad Akamai performance due to Tata-NTT peering issue.

I was trying Zembra mail since there’s no more free Google Apps edition and one of my friend asked me to basic email on his domain up. It was more or less a straight task by installing Zembra with decent GUI.

NIXI i.e National Internet Exchange of India is well known for it’s inefficiency and for its bad policies. I am posting this blog post to discuss some of them.  

Bit of background:

NIXI is one (and only) Indian IXP i.e Internet Exchange Point established in 2003 so as to facilitate peering between Indian ISPs. Before this, there were lot of cases when Indian ISP’s were connecting to each other from outside India in Singapore and Europe. Thus NIXI established few exchanges in key cities where necessary infrastructure was provided to ISP’s to “peer”.  With peering, the strict technical meaning is that exchange of traffic between ISPs.    

Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend from Airtel after long time. For some strange reason discussion topic was changed to old statements from Bharti Airtel’s executives that companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc should pay to ISPs like Airtel for “data interconnection”. The argument goes more for Google then any other company. Statements from Airtel can be found here and here. 

The argument?

Companies like Airtel who have built a “physical infrastructure” feel that companies like Google should pay to them since they are putting so much of traffic on their networks. Airtel feels that services like YouTube take significant amount of bandwidth and thus requires and infrastructure from core, middle mile to edge part of network and all that needs significant investment. Similarly there was another argument from Mr Sunil Mittal about fact that Facebook is enjoying on top of infrastructure which ISPs like Airtel have created.

Interestingly routing issues didn’t spare one of top CDN provider - Akamai!

So what’s wrong?

(from my BSNL connection):

PING akamai.com (61.213.189.49) 56(84) bytes of data.  
64 bytes from 61.213.189.49: icmp_req=1 ttl=52 time=492 ms  
64 bytes from 61.213.189.49: icmp_req=2 ttl=52 time=492 ms  
64 bytes from 61.213.189.49: icmp_req=3 ttl=52 time=474 ms  
64 bytes from 61.213.189.49: icmp_req=4 ttl=51 time=492 ms  
64 bytes from 61.213.189.49: icmp_req=5 ttl=51 time=489 ms

\--- akamai.com ping statistics --- 
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 22236ms  
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 474.296/488.469/492.837/7.183 ms

~ 500ms is way too high. Even US is at like 300ms latency.

Looking at traceroute: 

traceroute to akamai.com (61.213.189.49), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets  
1 router.local (192.168.1.1) [AS8151/AS28513] 4.223 ms 4.979 ms 5.879 ms  
2 117.200.48.1 (117.200.48.1) [AS9829] 45.241 ms 46.384 ms 52.839 ms  
3 218.248.173.46 (218.248.173.46) [AS9829] 87.089 ms \* \*  
4 115.114.57.165.static-Mumbai.vsnl.net.in (115.114.57.165) [AS4755] 74.675 ms 76.970 ms 80.856 ms  
5 if-0-100.tcore2.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net (180.87.39.25) [\*] 83.234 ms 84.403 ms 87.742 ms  
6 if-6-2.tcore1.L78-London.as6453.net (80.231.130.5) [AS6453] 230.777 ms 185.553 ms 194.288 ms  
7 \* Vlan704.icore1.LDN-London.as6453.net (80.231.130.10) [AS6453] 203.104 ms \*  
8 Vlan522.icore1.LDN-London.as6453.net (195.219.83.22) [AS6453] 308.973 ms 310.324 ms 311.038 ms  
9 ae-4.r23.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.40) [AS2914] 311.799 ms 333.841 ms 313.348 ms  
10 as-0.r22.osakjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.35) [AS2914] 499.075 ms 501.158 ms 512.657 ms  
11 ae-5.r24.tokyjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.221) [AS2914] 484.258 ms 485.401 ms 499.039 ms  
12 \* \* \*  
13 xe-2-3.a17.tokyjp01.jp.ra.gin.ntt.net (61.213.169.214) [AS2914] 488.807 ms 489.543 ms 495.396 ms  
14 61.213.189.49 (61.213.189.49) [AS2914] 506.170 ms 501.504 ms 507.296 ms

So route is like Mumbai (India) - London (UK) - Tokyo (Japan).