Archive

Category Archives for "Renesys"

No turning back: Russia activates Crimean cable

The Crimean peninsula depends critically on the Ukrainian mainland for infrastructure services: power, water, and Internet. That has begun to change in the last few days, as Crimean ISPs began receiving their first Internet services over the newly constructed Kerch Strait Cable, linking Crimea with the Russian mainland. The message: there is no turning back now in the process of infrastructure consolidation. kerch_strait

It’s a symbolic step that’s been months in the making. Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev ordered the immediate construction of a new submarine cable across the Kerch Strait, one that would connect mainland Russia to the peninsula.

At Medvedev’s direction, Russian state-owned telecommunications company Rostelecom quickly constructed a submarine cable across the Kerch Strait at a cost of 400-900 million rubles (11-25 million US dollars). On April 25th, Rostelecom announced that the cable was completed. medvedev

But laying a short cable through shallow littoral waters is simple work, compared to the process of convincing Crimea’s ISPs to accept Internet service — any Internet service — from a Russian carrier. April passed, and then May, and June. We knew that when the Continue reading

Kurdish ISPs enable growth of Iraqi Internet

The recent violence in Iraq and the government’s actions to block social media and other Internet services have put a spotlight on the Iraqi Internet. However, an overlooked but important dynamic in understanding the current Iraqi Internet is the central role Kurdish ISPs play in connecting the entire country to the global Internet.

In the past five years, the Internet of Iraq has gone from about 50 networks (routed prefixes) to over 600. And what is most noteworthy this that the growth has not occurred as a result of increased connectivity from the submarine cable landing at Al Faw, as would be expected in a typical environment. Instead the dominant players in the Iraqi wholesale market are two Kurdish ISPs that connect to the global Internet through Turkey and Iran: Newroz and IQ Networks. Iraq-International-Internet-Connectivity-Paths-by-Dyn@72dpi

Help from the Kurds

The Iraqi Kurdistan region contains four main cities: Erbil, Duhok, Zakho and Sulaymaniyah. Newroz covers the first three, while IQ Networks provides service in the last. However, it would be incorrect to simply classify these providers as city-level retail ISPs. They also carry significant amounts of traffic for the rest of the country.


logo4        iq-networks-orig-220x48

From the relative peace and stability of Continue reading

Brazil’s Winning Internet

Another World Cup is in the books, and it’s fair to say that most people will remember 2014 for the inglorious and improbable performance of the host nation, losing 7-1 and 3-0 in its semifinal and consolation matches. Brazil’s sad exit capped off a year of soul-searching about the nation’s massive investment in hosting the World Cup (and the Olympics yet to come).

But Brazil shouldn’t lose sight of one important silver lining to their World Cup cloud: the startlingly vibrant development of the Brazilian Internet, and the critical role Brazil now plays in the Internet connectivity and ICT development of South America.

Preparations for the World Cup and the Olympics may have helped light a fire under Brazil’s Internet infrastructure providers. Here’s a plot of the growth of the set of autonomous systems (that is, enterprises and service providers who originate IPv4 address space under their own registered Autonomous System Number) in Brazil over time. For comparison, we’ve also included the same statistic for South Africa. By this measure, the two World Cup host countries couldn’t be more different! brazil0

Brazil and South Africa invite comparison because of their many parallels: Continue reading

Amid raging violence, Iraq orders Internet shutdowns

Update (10:00ET, 14-Jun-2014): See below for a copy of Friday’s Iraqi MoC order to disconnect social media.

Iraq is descending into further violence, as militant group ISIL takes control of Mosul and beyond. Renesys has observed two large Internet outages this week (here and here) that our sources confirmed to be government-directed outages. These interruptions appear to coincide with military operations, amid concerns that ISIL forces are using Internet websites to coordinate their attacks.

The screencapture image in this tweet shows an email message announcing the latest shutdown. It reads:

Dear Valued customers

Due to the current security situation in iraq and as per the MOC instruction sent by the PM Mr Nori Kamel Al-Maliki ,the internet service will be suspended for the below provinces until further notice starting from today Thursday 12/6/2014 , Continue reading

Renesys, Dyn Join Forces

Today, we’re announcing the acquisition of Renesys by Dyn, the leading provider of Internet Performance solutions. Dyn and Renesys represent the perfect combination of Internet Intelligence assets from Renesys and Traffic Management and Message Management solutions from Dyn. We’re excited to become part of the Dyn team!

Those who know both companies may ask, “What took you so long?” Our headquarters are located blocks apart in beautiful downtown Manchester, New Hampshire, and the two founding teams have known each other for years. Dyn and Renesys share a surprising amount of cultural DNA – building scalable global infrastructure, understanding the economics and performance of the Internet at a deep technical level, and helping our customers deliver smarter, faster service worldwide.

Why Renesys? Why Dyn?

Renesys builds network performance management products for the Internet. We help enterprises tackle the strategic and operational challenges of delivering service over the public Internet, to consumers and businesses beyond the firewall. We operate a best-in-breed global Internet measurement platform, performing over a billion measurements each day to assess the Internet’s health and function. Anywhere in the world, when a decision maker needs insight into local Internet infrastructure, performance impairment, economics, competition, or strategy, we 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

Beware the Ides of March: Subsea Cable Cut Trend Continues

Earlier this month, the International Cable Protection Committee, a submarine cable advisory group, held their annual plenary in Dubai. One question that they could have considered is: Why do so many submarine cables get cut in the February/March timeframe? In this blog, we’ll look back at the last three years and the submarine cable industry’s own version of March Madness.

2012

Two years ago in February 2012, we saw a rash of closely-timed submarine cable cuts, causing Internet disruptions extending into March. In one incident, three cables were simultaneously severed in the Red Sea on February 17th, and then a fourth was damaged on the 25th off the coast of Kenya. The fourth cable was the TEAMS (The East African Marine System) cable systems, which runs from Mombasa to Fujairah, UAE.

We detailed the impact of the TEAMS cable break here, noting the resilience of many East African providers, who had purchased redundant capacity on the other two East African submarine cables: EASSy and SEACOM. The TEAMS cable would experience a second cut just weeks after it was repaired, which led TEAMS to threaten a lawsuit against the Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) over the repeated damage caused by 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

1 … 3 4 5