India Internet Access Problems Whitepaper_Ver 2.2

India Internet Access ‘Problems’ - Whitepaper

Date: 10-July-2016

Author: Arin BurmanGlobal NextGen Sales Engineering

DOCUMENT CONTENT

1. Executive Summary 3

2. Best Practices for Internet Access in India 4

2.1. Implementing Anycast DNS instead of Unicast DNS 4

2.2. Use of Regional Anycast with BGP Traffic Engineering 5

2.3. EDNS0 - EDNS Client Subnet - Answer to DNS Inaccuracies 6

2.4. Choosing the right service provider 7

2.5. Fine tuning the DNS TTL 7

2.6. Map the Internet – Continuously 7

3. Mobile Internet Dynamics in India 8

4. Tata Communications – India’s Leader in IP Transit Business 11

5. Conclusion 11

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1.Executive Summary

The Indian Internet market has grown by leaps and bounds – It was valued at only $11 billion in 2013, and could rise to $137 billion by 2020.Internet users in India are growing at a fast pace. The numbers have gone up by 49% from 2015 and is expected to reach 426 Million by June 2016. To leverage this exponential growth, major online firms and Over-The-Top (OTT) players are looking at India as their growth driver.

The mobile user spectrum in India has been far more aggressive than fixed line in the past 5 years. The following points depict this explosive growth of Mobile and its internet usage

1) India is the world’s 2nd largest mobile market after China with 482 Million unique users and 1 Billion connections (excluding M2M).

2) India is the world’s 3rd largest smartphone market, with 185 Million smartphone connections. (Projected to be half a billion by 2020 and this is only 40% of the population!).

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3) The Indian Mobile Industry has 12 Active Mobile Operators, who have pulled in 18 Billion USD of capex investment in the past 4 years.

4) Mobile data traffic is expected to grow at a rate of 66% from 2014 through 2020.

With this appetite of growth in mind, content providers are in the process of buying large amounts of IP Transit capacity in India from various Service Providers. However, even after these buy outs, many of them are still trying to solve some key problems pertaining to their user traffic in India. A few of the issues they face are:

1) Traffic from India is being served from an IP Port outside India 2) Suboptimal in-country routing 3) Coverage latency within the country

In order to address the above problems, Tata Communications’ Global Next Gen Sales Engineering group has come up with few advisory steps, intended to act as guidelines for Content Service Providers and OTT companies, to enable them to choose the right Internet Service Provider (with the relevant capability) in the Indian Internet market.

2. Best Practices for Internet Access in India

2.1. Implementing Anycast DNS instead of Unicast DNS

Unicast DNS - has a one-to-one association between network address and network endpoint: each destination address uniquely identifies a single receiver endpoint. If any of the Name Servers (NS) goes down, then queries to that NS will be black holed.

Anycast DNS -- has a one-to-many association between network addresses and network endpoints: each destination address identifies a set of receiver endpoints, but only one of them is chosen at any given time, to receive information from any given sender.

In addition, an Anycast DNS network will automatically route queries to the NS that is closest to the client geographically. So even though the servers listed for NS1 could be located in the US, Europe, and Asia, a client in China will only get responses from the NS in Asia, rather than having their queries routed to several different continents.

ADNS “instances” are deployed globally with multiple copies of each ADNS server located in many geographically dispersed locations. Just like Unicast DNS, each instance

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is referenced by one hostname / IP address, but instead of a single server in a single location, there are multiple copies of the ADNS servers, in multiple locations all over the world.

Tata Communications, being the largest IP Transit provider in India (AS 4755), supports IPV6 Anycast traffic. We also have a dedicated team who helps customers in testing the ADNS functioning.

Tata Communications DNS service, in partnership with the Internet Systems Consortium renders you a strong F-Root Name Server, which helps you run your Anycast traffic with ease.

2.2. Use of Regional Anycast with BGP Traffic Engineering

We learned that Anycast solves many inherent problems of DNS. However, it has also been found that Anycast at a Global level can give suboptimal results.

This is because, Anycast uses Hop based decision making and not the shortest path (latency). This gives rise to inaccurate results in intercontinental destination traffic.

Publishing a single Anycast IP in a Geo region, and then fine tuning the BGP to select the best web server in that region, can give you better results.

For intercontinental traffic, GEO DNS provides the best results.

Benefits

Simple, yielding high performance Avoids DNS Correlation issues Faster convergence (without TTL)

Trade offs

Relinquish Routing Control Right sizing of Edge nodes needed Overload possibility

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2.3. EDNS0 - EDNS Client Subnet - Answer to DNS Inaccuracies

It has been found that around 40% of enterprise traffic faces suboptimal traffic handling due to DNS inaccuracies. This DNS problem happens due to 2 very basic causes:

DNS assignment is based on the IP address of the user's DNS resolver and not the user's device. So, if a user in India is using a Singapore DNS resolver, they will be assigned to your Singapore PoP instead of the India PoP.

The A-Records database by DNS providers for converting an IP address to a location might not be completely accurate. Their country-level targeting is generally much better than their city-based targeting.

In order to solve this intriguing problem, a new DNS mechanism has evolved, named EDNS0. This DNS protocol extension allows the recursive server to pass the user’s subnet address to the authoritative server, finally giving the authoritative server visibility to the actual end user address (the subnet is sent rather than the specific IP address for privacy reasons). ECS is winding its way through the IETF standards process and has already seen wide deployment: major DNS providers such as Google and OpenDNS—the ones whose users are most geographically distributed—already support it. So the issue of the authoritative server not knowing the end user’s address, to make accurate steering decisions, is going away quickly.

2.4. Choosing the right Service Provider

Many a time customers complain that their user traffic is being served out of a Geo region. For example, Indian users of any website are pointing to a Singapore POP instead of an India POP.This issue normally arises due to insufficient IP Ports in the region of the Partner ISP that the customer procures their IP Port from.These ISPs buy IP Transit in India and other Geo locations from Tier-1 providers like Tata Communications. However, when their in-country port capacity reaches a threshold, they advertise customer routes outside India. This gives rise to sub optimal customer traffic handing, and as a result – an inferior end-user experience.

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Buying Internet Ports directly from Tata Communications will enable companies to provide a much better end-user experience. This comes from our underlying network capacity and the spread of our IP POPs.Traffic from India users will be served from India POPs, thus enhancing your end user experience.

2.5. Fine tuning the DNS TTL

The benefits of caching are pretty obvious: it’s a lot faster to check your local resolver’s cache then having to look up a DNS record that isn’t already cached. This speeds up your Internet experience when visiting a site that you go to often (since less time is needed to complete DNS lookups), and also helps lower the load on DNS servers around the world.

What happens when the DNS record changes? This is where the potential downside of caching becomes evident. If a DNS record is cached, then a new lookup is not done until that cache expires. Thus, the resolver that has the cached record won’t have any way to find out about the changed record until its cache expires.When you hear someone mention that they are waiting for DNS to propagate, they are waiting for cached DNS records to expire at all of the different resolvers that previously looked it up. If you have a 1-day TTL on a record, that means it would take a full day for any change to propagate around the world.

You want to strike the best balance between having a low TTL (enabling fast changes when needed) and high TTLs (taking advantage of DNS caching).For very critical records, that can change often or need to change in an emergency, you can set TTLs as low as 30 seconds.

2.6. Map the Internet – Continuously

Running probes at continuous intervals helps keep track of the Global Internet table changes. This can be done by Active probes, BGP AS Tracking via Netview, etc.The more aggressive the timers are, the quicker the path-failure-realization happens (and the faster the convergence). Tata Communications provides a special Looking Glass tool to ascertain the tentative traffic path and latency of any ASN.

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3. Mobile Internet Dynamics in India

No single content provider can grow their business without the mobile user base. Mobile traffic has contributed to around 60 % of total traffic that any content provider receives today.

Composition of Internet subscription

*Image Source: TRAI 2015 Indicator Reports

With India at sub 40 % mobile penetration at the moment, every company is looking at explosive growth in mobile user traffic from India.

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However, mobile internet adds some complexity in the equation, compared to a wired internet solution.

Let’s look at the elements involved in the Mobile Internet. Broadly it can be classified as:

1) Mobile Unit 2) Home Network (Incumbent Mobile Service Provider)3) IP Interconnection and Transit Provider4) Content Service Provider / Transit Service Provider

Mobile unit

This is the User Interface for Mobile Internet. Today, India is the 3rd largest smartphone market, with 185 Million handsets. The advent of low cost smartphones, primarily from the Asian market, is driving this penetration to great levels. Content providers are now trying to forge a partnership with these phone manufacturers, to install their mobile applications right at the build stage. This helps increase service adoption, and coupled with free sponsored data (content provider pays for the data usage), makes it a good growth engine.

Home Network (Mobile Service Provider)

This the incumbent Mobile Service Provider (MSP), who provides its number to the user. The MSP builds and manages the most important link in this ecosystem i.e., the last mile. Be it Technology like 2G, 3G, & 4G, or the spread of its network, the MSP is the key decision maker on how its users get access to the internet.

A few important attributes that a good MSP possesses, and maintains are:

Reachability: Both in the Home network and Foreign networks

Good Session Continuity: When the user moves between Home and Foreign

Networks

Good Mobility: Terminal (when the mobile unit changes), Session (when the

access point changes), and Network (when the MSP changes).

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IP Interconnection

This is the backbone of traffic flow in both Wired and Mobile internet connections. The performance of any MSP depends on how it interconnects with its Service Providers. Internet Interconnects are of 2 types : Peering and Transit.

Peering : This is a mutual agreeement between 2 Service Providers, to exchange each other’s customer routes. This is generally done without any commercial commitments. Conventional Hot Potato routing is part of this peering exchange.

Transit : This involves a commercial obligation wherin the Transit Provider ISP needs to carry the traffic of the Transit Customer ISP. In most cases, the Transit Provider carries traffic to and from its other customers, and to and from every destination on the internet, as part of the Transit arrangement.

Peering, thus offers a provider, access to only a single provider’s customers. Transit, by contrast, usually provides access (at a predictable price), to the entire internet.

With Tata Communications wholesale relationships with all the small and large MSPs/MNOs in India, content delivery becomes much easier, as routes are exchanged locally within the same cities.

Content Service Provider / Transit Service Provider

No single ISP owns a network that reaches all points of the Global Internet. Therefore, in some cases, ISPs may choose to buy transit from other ISPs, rather than build a network to reach a specific part of the globe. This is typically due to the opportunity cost of building a network vs. outsourcing (buying Transit). This model may apply to a small ISP, as well as to the largest of global ISPs.

In this scenario, it is very imprtant to choose the correct Peering and Transit Provider. In India, Tata Communications handles the largest IP Transit business and capacity. With its deep wholesale relationships with all the MSPs/MNOs , Tata Communications enables its Transit Customers to enjoy the fastest access possible to their content, from their India Mobile Users.

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4. Tata Communications – India’s Leader in IP Transit Business

Tata Communications has been a leader in India’s IP Transit industry. This position has been based on our unparalleled infrastucture and the rich experience of our people.

A few salient features that make Tata Communications the most favorable Transit provider in India are:

Tata Communications serves more than 80 ISPs in India, which means faster access for users

More than 3000 small and large customers, which signifies a trusted and reliable network

800 Gbps of Domestic IP capacity spread in 120 cities Over 300 Gbps of IP Capacity going out of India Ranked 4th in Global IP World, with 9 Tbps of IP Backbone Traffic Owner of the World’s largest submarine cable network

5. Conclusion

Many global content service providers and OTT providers are looking at an ever-increasing internet user base, with a huge growth in especially in India. India has found its place in almost all companies’ growth roadmaps, and many have committed to making substantial investments, aimed at revenue growth in the next 5, 10, even 15 years. However, as every new development has its own challenges, the Indian Internet market is still evolving and trying to reach a new perfect(!) market place. It is imperative that investing companies partner with a reliable, trusted and legally compliant ISP provider, to ensure their forecasted growth.

At Tata Communications, we carry a legacy of Trust, Customer Centricity, Ethics, abidingby the law. We have extensive experience in today’s dynamic Internet market in India, and would be glad to assist organisations to grow their business here.

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India Internet Access Problems Whitepaper_Ver 2.2

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