Earl Zmijewski

Author Archives: Earl Zmijewski

A Baker’s Dozen, 2016 Edition

As is our annual tradition, this blog provides a year-end review of how the Internet providers at the top of our Internet Intelligence – Transit global rankings fared over the previous year.  The structure, performance and security of the Internet remains a huge blind spot for most enterprises, even those critically dependent on it for business operations.  These are familiar topics that we’ve covered over the years in this blog and our Twitter feed, and 2016 was no different.  We saw bogus routing and subsequent grossly misdirected traffic from Ukraine and Iran, for just two examples.  We saw cable breaks, new cable activations, censorship and crippling attacks.  And much, much more.  Dyn provides such critical insight into the structure and performance of the Internet, both real-time and historical, and uses this data set to make 40 billion traffic steering decisions daily for customers.

Back in 2008, we chose to look at the 13 providers that spent at least some time in the Top Ten that year, hence the name “Baker’s Dozen“.  We repeated that exercise in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 Continue reading

A Baker’s Dozen, 2015 Regional View

Our Baker’s Dozen blog focuses on the top global Internet providers as measured by quantity of transited IP space.  If your market is not truly global, it pays to consider your provider options by region, country or even city.  Our Internet Intelligence product suite is designed around helping our customers understand the structure, performance and reliability of the Internet regardless of their geographic scope or potential providers.  In other words, there is a lot more to consider than just a top global list by a single metric.  To explore this topic further, we’ll look one geographic level deeper into the Internet Intelligence – Transit rankings for the top-5 providers by continent.  As we’ll see below, these can vary considerably from our top global list and even include other players with a more regional focus.  Let’s take a quick look.

 

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At the end of 2015, Cogent (AS174) was ranked  as the #4 global provider by our metric, but it closed the year as #1 in Africa, opening up a wide margin over Level 3 (AS3356), its nearest competitor on the continent.  Cogent started transiting a sizeable number of new prefixes from South Africa’s Continue reading

A Baker’s Dozen, 2015 Edition

As is our annual tradition, this blog provides a year-end review of how the Internet providers at the top of our Internet Intelligence – Transit global rankings fared over the previous year.  The structure and performance of the Internet remains a huge blind spot for most enterprises, even those critically dependent on it for business operations.  Whether it’s the next 3 billion people coming online, poor performance due to suboptimal routing, impaired connectivity due to natural disasters or sabotage, slow DNS performance, routing leaks, or security breaches of a trust-based Internet infrastructure, Dyn provides critical insight into the structure and performance of the Internet, both real-time and historical, via its Internet Intelligence product suite.  More importantly, our services help our customers make the changes necessary to optimize Internet availability, reliability, and reach in a very dynamic environment.

Back in 2008, we chose to look at the 13 providers that spent at least some time in the Top Ten that year, hence the name “Baker’s Dozen“.  We repeated that exercise in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014.  During the past 8 years, I’ve Continue reading

Iran: Latest Nation to Host Critical Global Internet Infrastructure

K-Root-Failures-India

As crippling economic sanctions are poised to be lifted by the United States, Iran is starting to emerge from its isolation as a regional and, in a very limited sense, global Internet player.  Iran continues to methodically build out its Internet infrastructure, working on its domestic connectivity (including IPv6), providing service to neighboring countries (such as Iraq and Afghanistan), stockpiling limited IPv4 address space, and providing a strategic terrestrial alternative to vulnerable submarine cables.

Recently, Iran began hosting a root DNS server, thereby potentially providing this critical service to the rest of the world.  In this blog, we’ll explore some of these latest developments and their challenges.  In November, European Internet registrar RIPE will hold its regional operator meeting (MENOG) in Tehran, where attendees from around the world will learn firsthand about recent developments in the fast-growing Iranian Internet.

K-root Debuts in Iran

As most readers of this blog will know, when you access any resource on the Internet by name (e.g., www.cnn.com), your computer must first convert this name into an IP address (e.g., 23.235.46.73), which it then uses to gain access to Continue reading

A Baker’s Dozen, 2014 Edition

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As is our annual tradition, this blog provides a year-end review of how the Internet providers at the top of our IP Transit Intelligence global rankings (formerly, Renesys’ Market Intelligence) fared over the previous year.  The structure and performance of the Internet remains a huge blind spot for most enterprises, even those critically dependent on it for business operations.  Whether it’s the next 3 billion people coming online, poor performance due to suboptimal routing, or security breaches of a trust-based Internet infrastructure, Dyn provides critical insight into the structure and performance of the Internet, both real-time and historical, via its Internet Intelligence products.  More importantly, our services help our customers make the changes necessary to optimize Internet availability, reliability, and reach.  This blog reviews a single very small slice of our data related to the sizes of the top global players as it pertains to the markets and customers they serve.

Back in 2008, we chose to look at the 13 providers that spent at least some time in the Top Ten that year, hence the name “Baker’s Dozen“.  We repeated that exercise in 2009, 2010, 2011, Continue reading

Indonesia Hijacks the World

Yesterday, Indosat, one of Indonesia’s largest telecommunications providers, leaked large portions of the global routing table multiple times over a two-hour period. This means that, in effect, Indosat claimed that it “owned” many of the world’s networks. Once someone makes such an assertion, typically via an honest mistake in their routing policy, the only question remaining is how much of the world ends up believing them and hence, what will be the scale of the damage they inflict? Events of this nature, while relatively rare, are certainly not unheard of and can have geopolitical implications, such as when China was involved in a similar incident in 2010.

Keep in mind that this is how the Internet is designed to work, namely, on the honor system. Like Twitter and Facebook, where you can claim to be anyone you want, Internet routing allows you to lay claim to any network you want. There is no authentication or validation. None. But unlike Twitter and Facebook, such false claims propagate through the world in a matter of seconds and decisions, good or bad, are made algorithmically by routers, not humans. This means that innocent errors can have immediate global impacts. In this incident, Continue reading

Turkish Internet Censorship Takes a New Turn

Internet censorship in Turkey took a new and ominous turn yesterday. In order to better seal off access to social media sites like YouTube and Twitter, the incumbent TurkTelecom began hijacking the IP address space of public DNS resolvers like those of Google. This allows TurkTelecom servers to masquerade as Google DNS servers, returning whatever answers they want. Under normal circumstances, such queries would have been destined for servers outside the country, which is how Turkish users were circumventing the ban on YouTube imposed earlier this week. However, now local users of these global DNS services are surreptitiously redirected to alternate providers within TurkTelekom. You can see this route redirection for yourself, here and here.

Recap

Turkey’s 25th and current Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has publicly and repeatedly expressed his dislike of social media, instructing various sites to be blocked. The current attempt to curtail this important medium began on March 21st via DNS poisoning of Twitter by Turkish ISPs, probably trying to implement the government-mandated ban in a minimally invasive way.

But Continue reading