I’ve recently returned from the NANOG 61 meeting in Seattle (well, Bellevue, just across the lake), a fantastic meeting with well over 800 attendees. It was good to meet some new folk as well as catch up with some industry contacts and old friends.
One of the topics which came up for discussion was the activities of the Open-IX association. This is a group which exists to promote fairness and open competition between Internet Exchange and Co-location operators in the US, and thus improve the competitiveness of the market for the users of those services, such as ISPs and content providers.
It was originally set-up to address what was something of a market failure and a desire by a number of US network operators to encourage organisations that run Exchange facilities (such as Equinix) to have more transparent dealings with their customer base, such as fair pricing and basic expectations of service level. This is something that is more common in Europe, where a large majority of Internet Exchanges are run as non-profits, owned and steered by their participant communities.
To do this, the Open-IX Association don’t actually plan to own or operate exchanges, but instead act as a certification body, developing a set of basic standards for exchange companies to work to. It’s somewhat succeeded in it’s initial goals of correcting the market failure. New IXP entrants in the shape of the three large European IXPs have entered the North American market, and co-location operators who were previously less active in the interconnection market have become more engaged.
So, one of the questions asked is what next for Open-IX?
(Indeed, my former boss, LINX CEO John Souter even ventured to suggest it’s “served it’s purpose” and could be wound up.)
There has been questions from some smaller IXPs, they can’t meet all the criteria laid down in the OIX-1 standard (and possibly don’t wish to or have means of doing so). Does this some how make them a “less worthy” second-class IXP, despite the fact that they serve their own communities perfectly well?
In particular, both the Seattle Internet Exchange and Toronto Internet Exchange currently can’t comply with OIX-1, but at the same time it’s not important for them to do so. The difference being these are member-driven exchanges, more along the lines of the European model. Their members don’t require them to provide the services which would allow the organisations to confirm to OIX-1.
I don’t think anyone would venture to suggest that the SIX or TorIX are in some way “second class” though, right? They are both well run, have plenty of participants on the exchange fabric, and respected in the IX community.
This is a key difference between these exchanges and commercial operations such as Equinix: The member-driven IXPs such as SIX and TorIX don’t need an Open-IX to set standards for them. Those local communities set their own standards, and it’s worked for them so far.
And maybe that’s where the opportunity lies for Open-IX: To act like this “conscience” for the more commercial operators, in the same way as the members steer the non-profits?
Okay. So I only expect the Brits to get the title of this. Though if you’re desperate to be in on the “joke”, watch this YouTube video of an old British TV ad for some chocolates.
One of the things I do for the community is act as a “RIPE AtlasAmbassador” – that’s someone who helps distribute RIPE Atlas internet measurement probes into the wider Internet community. The Measurements Community Builders at the RIPE NCC send me a box of Atlas probes, I go to conferences, meetings and other get togethers and I give them out to folk who would like to host a probe, along with answering any questions as best I can.
Recently, Fearghas McKay of the IX Scotland steering group asked me if I had any data from the Atlas project on internet round-trip time for probes located in Scotland, to get to services hosted in Scotland, and if I could talk about it at a meeting of IX Scotland participants.
One of the challenges I was faced with was the distinct lack of source data. Firstly, there weren’t that many Atlas probes in Scotland to begin with, and those which are there are mostly located in the “central belt” – around Glasgow and Edinburgh. The furthest North was a single probe in Aberdeen, and Scotland is a big country – it’s around 300 miles from the border at Gretna to Thurso, one of the most northerly towns on the Scottish mainland, as far again as it is from London to Gretna. That’s not even counting the Orkneys, Shetlands or Hebridean Islands, which have their own networking challenges.
The second problem was that of those probes, only three at the time were on an ISP connected directly to IX Scotland, and one of those was down! The majority were on consumer broadband providers such as BT and Virgin Media, which aren’t connected to many regional exchanges.
I saw attending the IX Scotland meeting as a good chance to redress the balance and extend the usefulness of the Atlas platform by distributing probes to networks which could improve the coverage.
This has resulted in what is currently the most Northerly probe in the UK being brought online in Dingwall, not far from Inverness, thanks to the folk at HighNet. They’ve also got a few other probes from me, so expect to see more in that area soon.
Most Northerly Probe in the UK
HighNet aren’t connected to IX Scotland yet, but maybe now they’ve got access to this instrumentation it might help them make a business case to follow up on that.
I also issued a number of probes at UKNOF in Manchester last week and I’m looking forward to seeing where they turn up.
I’d really like to get some of the community broadband projects in the UK instrumented, such as B4RN and Gigaclear. These bring some of their own challenges, such as issues with equipment at the customer premises that can actually handle the available bandwidth on the connection! It would also be great to be able to draw comparisons in performance between the community fibre service and the slower ADSL service provided over long copper tails in those areas.
It’s colonialism all over again. Just not as we know it…
Last week, there was this announcement about the establishment of a new Internet Exchange point in New York by the US arm of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange – “AMS-IX New York” – or should that be “New Amsterdam”… 🙂
This follows on from the vote between AMS-IX members about whether or not the organisation should establish an operation in the US was carried by a fairly narrow majority. I wrote about this a few weeks ago.
This completes the moves by the “big three” European IX operators into the US market, arriving on US shores under the umbrella of the Open-IX initiative to increase market choice and competitiveness of interconnection in the US markets.
LINX have established LINX-NoVA in the Washington DC metro area, and AMS-IX are proceeding with their NY-NJ platform, while DECIX have issued a press statement on their plan to enter the NY market in due course.
One of the key things this does is bring these three IXPs into real direct competition in the same market territory for the first time.
There has always been some level of competition among the larger EU exchanges when attracting new international participants to their exchange, for instance DECIX carved itself a niche for attracting Eastern European and Russian players on account that many carrier services to these regions would hub through Frankfurt anyway.
But each exchange always had it’s indigenous home market to provide a constant base load of members, there wasn’t massive amounts of competition for the local/national peers, even though all three countries have a layer of smaller exchanges active in the home market.
Now, to some extent, they are going head-to-head, not just with US incumbents such as Equinix, TelX and Any2, but potentially with each other as well.
The other thing the AMS-IX move could end up doing is potentially fracture even further the NY peering market, which is already fractured – being served by three, maybe four, sizeable exchanges. Can it sustain a fifth or sixth?
Is it going to be economical for ISPs and Content Providers to connect to a further co-terminous IXP (or two)? Can the NY market support that? Does it make traffic engineering more complex for networks which interconnect in NY? So complex that it’s not worth it? Or does it present an opportunity to be able to more finely slice-and-dice traffic and share the load?
Don’t forget we’re also in a market which has been traditionally biased toward minimising the amount of public switch-based peering in favour of private bi-lateral cross-connects. Sure, the viewpoint is changing, but are we looking for a further swing in a long-term behaviour?
We found out from experience in the 2000s that London can only really sustain two IXPs – LINX and LONAP. There were at least 4 well-known IXPs in London in the 2000s, along with several smaller ones. (Aside… if you Google for LIPEX today, you get a link to a cholesterol-reducing statin drug.)
Going to locations on the East Coast may have made sense when we sailed there in ships and it took us several weeks to do it, but that’s no reason for history to repeat itself in this day and age, is it? So why choose New York now?
Will the EU players become dominant in these markets? Will they manage to help fractured markets such as NY to coalesce? If they do, they will have achieved something that people have been trying to do for years. Or, will it turn out to be an interesting experiment and learning experience?
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over time.
Yesterday the BBC ran this news item about the launch of a new Internet Exchange in Edinburgh – IX Scotland. This is the latest in an emerging trend of local IXPs developing in the UK, such as IX Leeds and IX Manchester.
There was some belief that this is the first Internet Exchange in Scotland, however those people have short memories. There have been two (or three) depending on how you look at it, attempts at getting a working IXP in Edinburgh in the past 15 years, all of which ultimately failed.
Or, I never thought of myself as a narcissist but…
Thanks to the folks at HEAnet, here’s a link to the video of the talk “It’s peering, Jim…” that I gave at the recent INEX meeting in Dublin, where I discuss topics such as changes in the US peering community thanks to Open-IX and try to untangle what people mean when they say “Regional Peering”.
The talk lasts around 20-25 minutes and I was really pleased to get around 15 minutes of questions at the end of it.
I also provide some fairly pragmatic advice to those seeking to start an IX in Northern Ireland during the questions. 🙂
Last week, I was over in Dublin having been invited to give a talk by my gracious hosts at the Irish Internet Exchange Point, INEX. I asked what sort of thing they might like me to talk about. We agreed that I’d talk about various trends in global peering, mainly because the INEX meeting audience don’t do massive amounts of peering outside of the island of Ireland.
(If you need to understand the difference between the UK, Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Eire and the island of Ireland this video will be a massive help. Thanks CGP Grey.)
One of the discussions we had was what is meant when we say “Regional” when talking about Internet Exchange points? In the UK, we generally mean exchanges which are outside of London, such as IX Leeds. When a “Regional IXP” is discussed in Africa, they actually mean a “super-national” IXP which possibly interconnects several countries across a region.
Why do the communities in these areas want IXPs that span national boundaries?
The main reason: latency.
There is a lot of suboptimal routing. Traffic being exchanged between adjacent countries on the same continent can end up making a long “trombone-shaped” trip to Europe and back. This has a negative effect on the user experience and on the local internet economy.
Round-trip times from RIPE Atlas probes in Southern African countries to a destination in South Africa
As you can see above, traffic from the test probes Kenya and Angola, along with the Maldives and the Seychelles is likely being routed to Europe for interconnection, rather than being handled more locally, if the round-trip time is an indication of route taken. The probes in Botswana, Zambia and Tanzania do somewhat better, and are definitely staying on the same continent. The African example is one of the obvious ones. Let’s look at something a bit closer to home…
Regional peering in Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland
There is already a well established exchange point in Dublin, INEX, with a good number of national and international members. Discussions are taking place between Internet companies in Northern Ireland (which, remember, is part of the UK) about their need for a more local place to exchange traffic, likely in Belfast. The current belief is a large amount of the traffic between sources and sinks in Northern Ireland goes to London or Amsterdam.
Firstly, how does traffic get from the UK (and by inference, most of the rest of Europe) and Northern Ireland? This is what Telegeography say:
Submarine Cables UK to NIRIPE Atlas Probes in Northern Ireland
So, I thought I’d do some RIPE Atlas measurements.
This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive analysis. More just exploring some existing theories and perceptions.
The first trick is to identify probes in Northern Ireland. From the RIPE PoV, these are all indicated as part of the UK (go and watch the video again if you didn’t get it the first time), so I can’t select them by country.
Fortunately, probe owners have to set their probe’s location – there is a certain amount of trust placed in them, there’s nothing stopping me saying my probe is somewhere else, but most probe owners are responsible techy types. The RIPE Atlas people also put the probe locations onto a coverage map.
I also needed some targets. Probes can’t ping each other (well, they can, if you know their IP address, and they’re not behind some NAT or firewall). The Atlas project provides a number of targets, known as “anchors”, as well as nodes in the NLnog ring which can act as targets. There’s an Atlas anchor in Dublin, but that couldn’t take any more measurements, so that wasn’t suitable as a target, but HEAnet (the Irish R&E network) and Amazon (yep, the folks that sell books and whatnot) have NLnog ring nodes in Dublin.
We also needed targets in Northern Ireland that seemed to answer ICMP relatively unmolested, and I chose DNS servers at Tibus and Atlas/Bytel, both of whom are ISPs in the North. The final things to add were “controls”, so I chose a friend’s NLnog ring box which I know is hosted in London, and two other UK-based Atlas probes, the one I have on my network at home, and one on Paul Thornton’s network in Sussex. These effectively provided known UK-Ireland and UK-NI latencies to the targets, and a known NI-London latency for the probes in NI.
So, let’s look at round-trip time from Northern Ireland to the NLnog ring node in London:
ICMP RTT NI Probes to nuqe.net NLnog ring server
So, we can see there are some variations, no doubt based on last mile access technology. In particular, the node shown here with the 54ms RTT (just North of Belfast) consistently scored a high RTT to all test destinations. Anyway, this gives us an idea of NI-London RTT. The fastest being 15ms.
We can therefore make a reasonable assumption that if traffic were to go from Belfast to London and back to Ireland again, a 30ms RTT would be the best one could expect.
(For the interested, the two “control” test probes in the UK had latencies of 5ms and 8ms to the London target.)
Now, take a look at the RTT from Northern Ireland to the node at HEAnet in Dublin:
ICMP RTT all NI probes to HEAnet NLnog ring node, Dublin
Only two of the probes in Northern Ireland have <10ms RTTs to the target in Dublin. All other probes have a greater RTT.
It is not unreasonable to assume, given that some have a >30ms RTT, or have exhibited a >15ms gain in RTT between the RTT to London and the RTT to Dublin, that this traffic is routing via London.
Of the two probes which show a <10ms RTT to HEAnet in Dublin, their upstream networks (AS43599 and AS31641) are directly connected to INEX.
Of the others, some of the host ASNs are connected to INEX, but the RTT suggests an indirect routing, possibly via the UK mainland.
The tests were also run against another target in Dublin, on the Amazon network, and show broadly similar results:
ICMP RTT all NI probes to Amazon NLnog ring node, Dublin
Again, the same two probes show <10ms RTT to Dublin. All others show >30ms. Doesn’t seem to matter if you’re a commercial or an academic network.
Finally, lets look at round trip times within Northern Ireland.
Here’s the test to a nameserver on the Tibus network:
ICMP RTT all NI Probes to Tibus Nameserver
Again, the same two probes report a lower than <10ms latency. I’d surmise that these are either routing via INEX, both host networks are downstream of the same transit provider in Belfast, or are privately interconnected in Belfast. At least two of the other nodes seem to route via the UK mainland.
To check this result, the same tests performed toward a nameserver on the Atlas/Bytel network:
ICMP RTT all NI probes to Atlas/Bytel Nameserver
Obviously, one of our probes is on-net, with a 1ms RTT!
Of the others, we’re definitely looking at “trombone routing” of the traffic, in most cases back to the UK mainland.
This may not be entirely surprising, as I’m told that BT don’t provide a 21CN interconnect node in Northern Ireland, so traffic on BT wholesale access products will “trombone” through the mainland in any case.
So, what’s really needed in Northern Ireland?
We’ve shown that if networks are willing to buy capacity to Dublin, they can happily exchange traffic at INEX and keep the latency down. An obvious concern some may have is the export of traffic from one jurisdiction to another, especially in light of recent revelations about systemic monitoring, if it’s NI to NI traffic.
The utility of IX in Northern Ireland could be hampered due to the lack of BT 21CN interconnect capability, as it may as well, for all intents and purposes be in Glasgow which is the nearest interconnect, for the traffic will still be making two trips across the Irish Sea whatever happens, assuming one end or the other is on the end of a BT wholesale pipe. (At worst, it could be 4 trips if both ends are on a BT pipe!)
If the goal is to foster internet growth (e.g. “production” of bandwidth) in Northern Ireland, where is it going to come from?
Are Northern Irish interests better served by connecting to the mature interconnect community in Dublin?
Is a BT 21CN interconnect in Belfast essential for growth, or can NI operators build around it?
Should INEX put a switch in Belfast? If they do, should it be backhauled to the larger community in Dublin? Or is that somehow overstepping the remit of an exchange point?
There has been speculation in the press, such as this Computer Weekly article, but I would say that it’s poorly informed, and even suggests that LINX’s pioneering deployment of Juniper’s PTX MPLS core switch might be a factor (which I think is a red herring).
It looks to have been some sort of storm of flooded traffic (such as unknown unicast, or broadcast) or problem in a network that’s attached to LINX, which managed to either congest the bandwidth of various ISP’s access lines into LINX, or congest the CPU on some of the attached routers, to the extent that they became unable to forward customer traffic, or unable to maintain accurate routing information (i.e. lost control plane integrity).
But, why did it appear to start on one of the two LINX peering platforms (the Extreme-based network) and then cascade to the physically seperate Juniper-based LAN?
I’m pressed for time (about to get on a plane), so I’ll quickly sum up with some informed speculation:
I don’t think…
The LINX was DDoS-ed (or specifically attacked)
The deployment of the Juniper PTX in the preceeding 24 hours had anything to do with it -LINX also seem to think this, as they switched a further PTX into service overnight last night
That there was any intentional action which caused this, more likely some sort of failure or bug
I do think…
A LINX-attached network had a technical problem which wasn’t isolated and caused a traffic storm
It initially affected the Extreme-based platform
It affected the CPU of LINX-connected routers belonging to LINX members
Some LINX members deliberately disconnected themselves from LINX at the time to protect their own platform
The reported loss of peer connectivity on the Juniper platform was “collateral damage” from the initial incident, for reasons I’ve outlined above – busy routers
LINX did the right thing continuing their PTX deployment
I’m sure there will be more details forthcoming from LINX in due course. Their staff are trained not to make speculation, nor to talk to the press, during an incident. Even those who handle press enquiries are very careful not to speculate or sensationalise, which I’m sure dissapoints those looking for a story.
The moral of this story is redundancy and diversity are important elements of good network engineering and you shouldn’t be putting all your eggs in one basket.
Disclaimer: I used to work for LINX, and I like to think I’ve got more than half a clue when it comes to how peering and interconnect works.
A few weeks ago, I wondered why a number of posts on my blog which had been quiet for a while saw some renewed interest – the series on regional peering suddenly saw a significant growth in readership – when I received word that there was group forming in Manchester to discuss the subject, instigated by Manchester co-lo operator m247 and involving (my former employer) the largest UK IXP, LINX.
I attended by all accounts a very successful first open meeting for the IXLeeds exchange point yesterday – with around 120 attendees, including many faces that are not regulars on the peering circuit making for brilliant networking opportunities and great talks from the likes of the Government super-fast broadband initiative, BDUK, and energy efficient processor giants ARM (behind the technology at the heart of most of the World’s smartphones), as well as more familiar faces such as RIPE NCC and LINX, among others.
Definitely impressed with the frank discussion that followed the talk by the DCMS’ Robert Ling on BDUK funding and framework, but still sceptical that it’s going to be any easier for smaller businesses to successfully get access to the public purse.
Andy Davidson, IXLeeds Director, was able to proudly announce that IXLeeds now provides support for jumbo frames via a seperate vlan overlaid on their switch, which is probably the only IXP in the UK which officially offers and promotes this service – at least for the time being. Of course, they are supporting a 9k frame size…
Well done to my friends and colleagues of IXLeeds for making it to this major milestone, and doing it in great style. It seems a long, long way from a discussion over some pizza in 2008.
The only thing I didn’t manage to do while in Leeds is take a look at the progress on the next phase of aql’s Salem Church data centre, but I’m sure I’ll just have to ask nicely and drop by aql at some point in the future. 🙂
Those of you who ran networks in the 1990s (possibly even in the early 2000s) will remember the excitement you had joining your first Internet exchange, plugging in that shiny new cable to your router interface, and setting up your first peerings.
Back then, you may also remember that in the rapidly growing Internet of the day, it was common courtesy to let your peers know that you’ve taken on a new customer, or acquired some new address space, so they could update their configs – particularly any filtering they were doing on the routes exchanged with you, which were often quite small and maintained manually, except for the largest providers.
Mike's Twitter Overflow - Tech, Travel, other stuff 