Airtel (AS9498) to take the lead on the RPKI RoV front

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 04:23:47 +0530

Just back from Mumbai after APNIC 62 and Equinix’s India Peering Forum. On excellent news: Airtel has started sending emails to its customers about RPKI RoV (Route Origin Validation). As per the mail, Airtel will start RPKI RoV soon and has mentioned 22 Sep 2026 as the timeline when they will start rolling out RoV. This is excellent news on the routing security front, and kudos to Airtel (AS9498) for taking the lead here among other large Indian backbones.

This brings up the important question of how many routes exist in their table which are RPKI RoV invalids as of today?

Looking at their announcements, I see the following:

RPKI Valids: 33,735
RPKI Unknown: 4632
RPKI invalids: 726

This is for their table, including downstream routes. One can view the complete list of those 726 invalids, including prefix and AS_PATH here. One interesting thing here is that out of 726, 140 are from Airtel fixedline AS24560 and 122 are from Airtel Mobility. In terms of address family, there are 108 invalids from IPv4 and 618 from IPv6.

How many of these invalids are single-homed vs multi-homed?

This is important to check, as often the argument against RoV given by various operators in past was that they were losing traffic to their competitors. When I checked, I do not see any of these prefixes visible outside of India behind a transit-free / tier 1 network without AS9498 in the path. It could be because Tata Comm AS6453 drops RPKI invalid already & most of these are not dual-homed via Jio AS64049. So unless a less specific RPKI valid announcement is there, these are anyway largely blackholed for now by networks & IXPs doing RoV outside of India.

Let’s hope other Indian backbones also start doing RPKI RoV soon. Happy routing! 😀

RoV on Personal blog of Anurag Bhatia

Airtel (AS9498) to take the lead on the RPKI RoV front

How many of these invalids are single-homed vs multi-homed?