Recent content on Personal blog of Anurag Bhatia
I find the concept of transit-free / Tier 1 networks fascinating. These are networks which, by definition, are transit-free. They do not have any transit and can reach the entire routing table just through peering relationships. The importance of these networks has reduced over time as more and more peering happens directly between eyeball networks and content networks. But regardless, I always…
Over the weekend I migrated my home router from multiple routing tables to a VRF-based design, placing each WAN uplink into its own VRF. While multiple routing tables worked for basic policy routing, they have some limitations and that led to several edge cases that became increasingly difficult to work around. Issues with the setup: If the active default route pointed to ISP1, traffic arriving on…
The recent debate around Airtel’s priority 5G generated plenty of noise. Personally, I’m not a fan of it either but Airtel and Jio are private companies. Their job is to maximise shareholder value, not to maintain market competition. The real question is why competition remains so limited. And by competition, I don’t mean another mobile operator. I mean fixed-line broadband. Two…
For the last few days I have been playing with RFC8950 setup, which allows routing of IPv4 on top of IPv6. While logically it’s quite simple, it has a very powerful application towards making “ IPv4 an optional ” feature riding on top of an IPv6 network ( but without any tunnels! ) Some of the interesting use cases: A large network can run IPv6 only everywhere on its core and…
Since the Telegram’s prefix hijack (4 days ago on 17-Jun-2026) by RCom, there is visible noise in the BGP routing table from multiple other Indian ISPs, including Tata Teleservices (AS45820) / Lightstorm (AS135709/AS152144), etc. mostly in IPv6. Let’s look at 2a0a:f280::/48 ( Live lookup here ) Notice all the ASNs here largely seem to be downstreams or peers of AS45820 in India, no…
The last few hours were quite noisy with a lot of discussion around Telegram block and Rcom’s hijack of Telegram prefixes. For those who may not know, Telegram has been blocked in India till 22 June 2026 ( news here ). The justification has been to avoid paper leak over the telegram. Anyways, I am not going into whether the block is good or bad as it can be part of an endless discussion…
In Dec 2022 I mapped popular CDNs like Google GGC, Facebook FNA, Akamai, etc. across Indian networks ( post here ). Since it’s been close to 4 years now, I wanted to do that again. This time, I decided to expand the scope to the entire globe instead of just the Indian networks. Mapping logic The logic here is simple: get unique prefixes from the global routing table, break them into /24s,…
India has done well on IPv6 deployment thanks to Jio taking the lead in 2016, along with Airtel & VI aggressively catching up. Many of us in the industry are very proud of the work done by these players, resulting in over 78% deployment of IPv6 when measured by APNIC / Google , etc. Jio and Airtel numbers are as high as 95% IPv6 preferred at this point in time. But that’s one part of the…
Over the years, I have seen a number of traces between Airtel (AS9498) and Tata Comm (AS4755) in India, which strongly suggests that routing tends to be ‘cold potato’ between them. By default, routing between large backbones that interconnect across different locations is typically ‘hot potato’ - meaning traffic exits to other ASNs as close to the source as possible Hot…
Last month (on 18th April 2026), I saw an alert for a strange route announcement: Prefix AS Path Origin ASN 117.120.58.0/23 262427 262761 263444 6453 3257 55836 9498 134863 134863 Background While this specific alert triggered because it had three large Indian backbones - Tata Comm (AS6453), Jio (AS55836) and Airtel (AS9498) and normally this would appear just as a leak by Jio for routes learnt…
For the last few weeks, I have been running a NetFlow collector for the home router. This is something I wanted to do for a long time, but I was missing the time to invest. There are a few open source options, and I guess many commercial solutions offering NetFlow, often bundled with other products. My personal monitoring is 100% open source and presently running Prometheus + Thanos + Node…
Friend and his two homes… Recently, a friend of mine mentioned his plan to procure dark fibre to connect two of his homes. His idea was straightforward - get LCO to give a dark strand between both homes and run Bidi optics over it. I ended up telling him that while his idea is technically fine, as modern optics can easily cover that sort of distance, it would be illegal as per Indian…
Since 20:08 IST / 14:38 GMT on 28 Jan 2026 , the latency between Airtel India and Europe has gone up along with significant packet loss. Here’s an example of shortlist 300+ endpoints from Airtel India with European endpoints: Traceroutes Airtel Haryana -> Contabo Europe Start: 2026-01-29T03:52:33+0530 HOST: desktop Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1. AS??? _gateway (172.16.0.1) 0.0% 10 0.2…
Earlier in the day, I came across Liberty Global (AS6830) seemingly originating several Vodafone Romania (AS12302) prefixes. Source: https://bgp.he.net/AS6830#_prefixes This is highly unusual because AS6830 is a large transit-free network. I have seen some transit-free networks leaking routes, but originating a large number of prefixes is not common. It has massive stakes from Belgium-based…
For the last few days, I have been playing with OpenTofu . For those who may not know, it’s a fork of last Terraform as Terraform’s license was changed due to IBM’s acquisition of Hashicorp and is a Cloud Native Foundation project. It can be used to quickly deploy (and remove) resources from various cloud players. Yesterday came across this tweet from Tailscale about…
I was in Mumbai a few months ago for the Equinix India Peering forum. The event happened to be very near the airport & I found that the airport, conference venue, hotel, and a few other locations I was visiting were all near the newly built Mumbai Line 3 (Aqua Line). To save on hassle with regular tickets, I went for an NCMC (National Common Mobility Card). Most people travelling in the Delhi…
A while back bgp.he.net added the feature of a live route propagation graph for a given prefix. Besides being near real-time, it is also specific to a prefix, e.g let’s look up for 2401:4900:87f0::/44 (Airtel mobility - 5G prefix): https://bgp.he.net/net/2401:4900:87f0::/44#_graph What sometimes confuses people is why there are multiple paths from a given ASN towards the originator ASN. Many…
A while back, I posted about Starlink’s Indian upstream . It’s interesting that now their prefixes are not visible behind routed via Telstra - AS4637 anymore, but it seems like they are testing Mumbai-based Microscan - AS55352. I have always been curious about how they interconnect globally, particularly with which IP transit providers. To find out, I have to establish a relation…
Multiple news articles came earlier in the day in Bangladeshi media, suggesting that BSNL (AS9829) has dropped its 10G link from BSCCL (AS132602) at 00:00 on 21st Oct. This was in use for connectivity in North Eastern states of India. Checking routing table for routes with AS_PATH “ 132602 9829 ” from a combined view of various route-collectors. Date BSNL prefixes behind BSSCL…
It’s the day of Diwali. Happy Diwali 🪔 to everyone reading this post. 😀 I am in holiday mode from couple of days and mostly reading (and binge watching). While reading paper on Apollo - Google’s optical circuit switching , I looked around and came across a fascinating Google’s talk from last year. This talk covers how they made their own optical switches. Quick notes (Advanced…