I read with some excitement that South African ISP MWEB have disconnected their transit connections with other ISPs in South Africa, claiming that their existing services from Vodacom and Telkom South Africa were congested and expensive, and detrimental to the quality of internet services in the country.
According to the RIPE RIS service, the links between MWEB (AS10474) to Telkom South Africa (AS5713) were disconnected on the November 2nd – Telkom being the original transit provider that MWEB used.
MWEB have detected that congestion reduces, therefore service levels increase when traffic bypasses the incumbent and is delivered directly to other ISPs in their region via peering links. If a network refuses to peer, MWEB simply deliver the traffic to local providers via their international links – possibly just as congested, but available at a fraction of a cost. If traffic is then delivered to the incumbents via links they themselves pay for, the incumbents also have a financial incentive to peer.
Peering is the best way to encourage enormous capacities between ISPs and other networks, because a direct one-to-one connection can be monitored and well managed in order to guarantee availability for internet traffic. Peering therefore increases available bandwidth and reduces bandwidth costs. This will enable high the sort of services that require high-bandwidth availability, like streaming media and high definition video conferencing.
Interestingly, thirty minutes after the adjacency with Telkom was severed, it appeared that MWEB picked up a new transit customer – Yebo, AS12258, with Yebo’s prefixes being advertised to Interoute (again, according to RIPE RIS). The commercial nature of this downstream relationship is, however, not revealed by the routing table.
The incumbent is perfectly entitled to – and well placed to – sell excellent transit links into the local market, but their strategy to do that, as I explained in my last article, must be to make the transit product in their key regions excellent – this means to peer with the key other local providers (not all providers) in the market, and to ensure that capacities across their backbone and to customers are well managed and available for traffic.
At Menog 7, I had the pleasure of enjoying an explanation of the Middle East IP market place (link), provided by James Cowie at research organisation Renesys.
It demonstrates clearly that deregulated markets offer enormous advantages over controlled ones, and should serve well as a reminder to operators and policy makers that simply getting out of the way could be the best way to further their aims for industry in any given region. This is mainly because:
Incumbent networks in this region have a huge opportunity to grow revenues, as the market expands, as long as they are willing to interconnect widely in this region. As the number of providers in a region expands, customers will be able to (and, according to this research, actually do) pick between innovative and disruptive new providers with excellent regional (via peering), and international (via transit) capacities. Peering also makes capacity cheap, because traffic can stay local to the ISP. An incumbent provider that refuses to peer in order to retain market share will not be able to compete in quality terms with the new providers. Defending a 100% market share is impossible in a competitive market, so the strategy must change, the aim must become enjoying the fruits of a booming market instead of monopoly. As the Renesys slides say, there is no dominent IXP in this region yet, with many networks dragging traffic to London, Amsterdam or Frankfurt to exchange, but this will change as the density of providers in the Middle East reaches a critical mass.
I’m in Istanbul at MENOG7 in order to present in a panel about internet exchange points. Our aim is to give groups of ISP networks in the Middle East enough knowledge to start internet exchange points, so there will also be presentations on the business case and organisational checklists. I am presenting on the technical pre-requisites required to build an Internet Exchange point.
Setting up an Internet Exchange point is simple from a technology point of view, but requires significant planning, and community support for the plans. Read the slides to find out more about what must be planned.
Download: [Slides + Notes (recommended)] ~ [Slides alone]
View directly from Slideshare (requires flash):
One of the main questions that enterprises ask NetSumo is how they can get access to better office connectivity, because their applications and workflow demand ever increasing quantities of bandwidth. Solving bandwidth capacity issues in the data centre is easy today and less expensive than it has ever been, but turning up huge capacities in your home or office is much more expensive.
Solving this bandwidth starvation is the role of fibre optics and next-generation broadband. A relatively simple way to roll out fibre backed technology is to use VDSL – service providers run high capacity fibre optic networks to distribution boxes in streets (FTTC – Fibre to the Cabinet), and utilise the existing copper infrastructure between street and house or business carries high speed internet. The shortness of the copper run enables higher speeds. This is increasingly available from companies such as Digital Region Broadband, who offer 40Mbit broadband at consumer prices, but is obviously only available in specific neighbourhoods where the streetboxes have been rolled out.
Removing the copper element will enable much higher speeds and new products like premise-to-premise connectivity. FTTP – Fibre to the Premises opens up a world where connectivity between service provider and your office can run at 100Mbit or Gigabit speeds. Office-to-home or Office-to-office connectivity that runs at Gigabit or even 10Gigabit would be possible too. This would make remote-working via high definition video conferencing, ultra high speed access to company resources and files, and also better quality and more interactive entertainment services a normal thing for everyone.
However, a national – even urban wide – fibre rollout project is expensive because of the construction (civils) costs, legal costs, and impact on neighbourhoods.
Earlier this month, Ofcom released a statement on wholesale access products, explaining that they were planning to require BT to make access to their existing ducts, intending to make fibre rollout cheaper. The two key mechanisms are:
I welcome this development, but hope that the regulation framework mandated by Ofcom does not remove the incentive BT to roll out new ducts and fibres. The regulation will be a success if it enables more regional FTTC broadband schemes like the one cited in South Yorkshire, and also if it makes new FTTP the ‘norm’ for all new housing developments and telecoms upgrades. Further, another huge disincentive from rolling out fibre based services — the UK fibre tax — must also be repealed in order to achieve the typical 30Mbit/sec broadband that the EU wish to see for all citizens by 2020.
In 1696, King William III of England imposed a tax on glass. Essentially, houses with more than ten windows paid a levy to the government, but the tax is now remembered as unfair and very avoidable by bricking up the windows in your home. Today there is a new tax on glass – firms who light the glass in fibre optic cable pay the government a levy based on the length of the fibre. Again the tax is desperately unfair, and very avoidable because firms can just not roll out services on fibre.
When firms avoid fibre, it hurts us all. When fibre is cheap, firms can use it to roll out super-fast broadband to their users, using the sort of technology that facilitates connections tens or hundreds of times faster than a typical UK home enjoys. It also allows service providers to increase the capacity of their network edge, and to improve the robustness of their network – for instance by building more links between their network points. Improved robustness also means better business continuity planning options, improving the availability of their services. This tax kills faster access, and better services.
The fibre tax also worsens the conditions for international networks looking to build into the UK, for instance in order to bring their content and services to the UK market . This is not a hypothetical risk, it is a game-changer that has destroyed the business cases of several projects that we have been contributed to last year.
This morning, George Osborne was on BBC TV explaining that he saw an advancement in next-gen broadband (based on fibre optic cabling) as a priority. If this is the case, then he must commit to repealing the 21st Century Window Tax. To date, they have only considered repealing the 50p per month tax on telephone lines that has been suggested by the hugely flawed Digital Britain study.
We are just not competitive with this tax.
Posted to my blog at the request of RobL !
On Nanog, Owen DeLong and Larry Sheldon were discussing the relative size of the IPv6 address space:
>> 64 bits is enough networks that if each network was an almond M&M, >> you would be able to fill all of the great lakes with M&Ms before you >> ran out of /64s. > Did somebody once say something like that about Class C addresses?
Well, this seemed like a challenge for Maths, and the answer is:
No. There are only 2,097,152 Class C networks.
Assuming all M&Ms are spheroids of uniform oblate nature, radius major axis=6mm, minor axis=3mm. Volume is (4/3)Pi (Major2) Minor
They will be poured into a great lake of your choice, and we will assume random close packing (agitation mechanisms are probably best discussed off-list) and a (generous, but this Wikipedia article insists) void fraction of 32%.
Volume of m&m = 0.452cm3, occupies 0.665cm3.
Lake Erie is 484km3 – See: http://www.epa.gov/glnpo/factsheet.html
1 km3 = 1,000,000,000,000,000 cm3
484,000,000,000,000,000 * 0.665 = 321,860,000,000,000,000 m&ms needed to
fill this lake.
There are 4,294,967,296 /64s in my own /32 allocation. If we only ever use 2000::/3 on the internet, I make that 2,305,843,009,213,693,952 /64s. This is enough to fill over seven Lake Eries. The total amount
of ipv6 address space is exponentially larger still – I have just looked at 2000::/3 in these maths.
THE IPv6 ADDRESS SPACE IS VERY, VERY, VERY BIG.
Can we please now just go ahead and roll out some ipv6 services?
We are now at the end of January, but IPv4, the Internet’s core addressing protocol still has a nasty hangover, and all signs are pointing to 2010 being a bad year for the protocol.
Since January 1st, a few key milestones have passed, indicating how urgent the IPv4 rundown problem has become. Firms that rely on internet connectivity must take urgent action in light of the events:
RIPE members should thoroughly audit their address space so that they can ensure that their records are accurate, because RIPE are more likely to ensure that address space is assigned to your end users in line with the community’s policies. ISPs and services providers who need help can contact me for further information or specific assistance.
Organisations who rely on internet connectivity for their products should ensure their providers have an IPv6 migration plan in place. Otherwise end-to-end connectivity for your home or office is unlikely to be something you can enjoy looking beyond the runout period. Companies hosting network services, for example a website, should enquire what their host’s IPv6 plans are, and start to enable their services via v6.
There is real traction to ensure v6 support appears in both the hardware and services you need to connect to the internet. It is easier today than before to find help making your services available via v6. The alternatives – patchy connectivity via nested stacks of ipv4 islands, or no more end-to-end connectivity (so that your internet service is a walled garden), have much worse consequencies than learning to roll v6.
Engineers know the facts by now and have no excuse. For more information, see the RIPE NCC’s information site, ipv6actnow.
Here are some slides that present some research undertaken by a number of European Internet Exchange points (IXPs), which I presented at UKNOF15 last week. They may be of interest to networks which connect to IXPs who have been considering connecting to the local multi-lateral peering (MLP) service, but are unsure whether testing has proved that the functionality and performance of the new ‘next-generation’ offerings (namely BIRD and OpenBGPd) are fit for purpose.
The slides show that the new route-servers perform splendidly well compared with traditional Quagga based MLPs, also that route-servers are now free of ‘first generation code’ bugs, and also that they handle your prefixes transparently – as you would expect.
Interestingly, BIRD and OpenBGPd behave identically ‘on the wire’ so IXPs are encouraged to use multi-vendor MLP on their platform for increased reliability and stability. The new breed of route-server code is dependable and tested, so networks that would like to connect should draw confidence from this testing, and IXPs wishing to roll out MLP services should feel confident in the software tested.
Happy peering!