Here's a good point raised by Avonsys (www.avonsys.com) for Fiji. Organizations responsible should consider it, and hopefully take it into a wider perspective for the development of Pacific Islands in country interconnection
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For a long time in Fiji there were only 3 Autonomous System Number (ASN), Fintel (2941), USP(24390) and a F-Root server(3557) hosted by USP.
These ASN represent network clouds interconnected to each other. The interconnection information is exchanged via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP tables define the backbone of the Internet: the tables hold the information on how to reach any IP address from any other IP address. BGP provides you with a complete view of the Internet, and you can choose with some capabilities the way your packets will travel from one destination to the other, but more importantly it allows you to have many paths to the rest of the Internet offering redundancy and reliability. When one BGP link is destroyed, the advertised routes are removed from the peering point and the peers of this peer and so on, which generates a reconfiguration of the Internet. If you have more than one BGP link, the other links gain higher priority and your packets are automatically rerouted via the alternate paths.
Wikipedia defines BGP as "The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the protocol backing the core routing decisions on the Internet. It maintains a table of IP networks or 'prefixes' which designate network reachability among autonomous systems (AS). It is described as a path vector protocol. BGP does not use traditional Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) metrics, but makes routing decisions based on path, network policies and/or rulesets. For this reason, it is more appropriately termed a reachability protocol rather than routing protocol."
In Fiji, the situation until recently (a month ago) is that FINTEL is connected (via the Southern Cross Cable) to the Internet backbone via BGP and is providing, static routes (non BGP) to the various ISPs (CONNECT, UNWIRED, KIDANET, VODAFONE, DIGICEL). Additionally, USP, the University of the South Pacific, with is main campus in Suva, Fiji, has its own Internet link to AARNET. USP is not connected locally to FINTEL. Internet packets from a student at home, have to go via Australia to reach an online courseware in the University, just across the road. USP also installed a Root Server on its network, this root server is only connected to USP network and therefore does not benefit any other ISP in Fiji.
A month ago, TFL, Telecom Fiji Limited (CONNECT parent company) got access to the Southern Cross Cable and set up its own link to the Internet via the ASN 45349, but as of today, FINTEL, TFL, USP are still not interconnected.
At the moment, none of these entities offer BGP peering, to any organization in Fiji. Why would you want BGP, static routes are more than enough, is the common question when asked about BGP peering in Fiji. BGP is a protocol that allows redundancy and reliability. It self configures depending on network conditions. Having more than one peering point, allows better operation, less downtime, etc... This is very important for the development of the Internet economy in Fiji, opening a wide range of operations and local content.
How can you get therefore reliability, and redundancy using BGP when no local ISPs offers you BGP Peering?
The answer is tunnels. Using the same method to get IPv6 when you local provider does not have native IPv6, you establish an IPv6 tunnel over IPv4 to a remote host. Here the trick is to create a tunnel, to make two peers look like next to each others. You then move IPv4 over IPv4. The whole tunnel is considered as a link (like a phone line, or DSL link), BGP can then run on top of this link, and provide the same capabilities as if the link was a physical link between two modems. You then use at the other end a remote router, which has BGP peering to the rest of the Internet, establish a tunnel from your office router to this router and then BGP peer with it. However you need to be careful that the route advertisement do not overwrite the route that allows the tunnel to function. Therefore on each router, you enter a static route to indicate the other end of the tunnel is not reached via the tunnel but via the local link. Because this route is more specific it will have priority over more generic routes.
It is indeed a cumbersome set up, but it has proven very reliable for our AS55327, it has also reduced drastically our downtime, and network reconfigurations each time one of our ISPs is down, making a breeze to operate a Network Operating Centre in Fiji. Until local ISPs offer BGP peering to finally fulfill the objectives of becoming the Internet hub of the Pacific, development in Internet in Fiji will be very limited. Call Centers, Data Centers, Internet Exchange points, Education (cf lack of peering with USP), local hosting, Content Delivery Network (CDN), will be very difficult to be established without this fundamental block.
In a paper at http://www.caida.org/publications/presentations/2006/wealthofnetworks/ Tom Vest, Internet Economist at CAIDA and OECD correlates the wealth of an economy to the wealth of networks and the number of ASN an economy has.
---
For a long time in Fiji there were only 3 Autonomous System Number (ASN), Fintel (2941), USP(24390) and a F-Root server(3557) hosted by USP.
These ASN represent network clouds interconnected to each other. The interconnection information is exchanged via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP tables define the backbone of the Internet: the tables hold the information on how to reach any IP address from any other IP address. BGP provides you with a complete view of the Internet, and you can choose with some capabilities the way your packets will travel from one destination to the other, but more importantly it allows you to have many paths to the rest of the Internet offering redundancy and reliability. When one BGP link is destroyed, the advertised routes are removed from the peering point and the peers of this peer and so on, which generates a reconfiguration of the Internet. If you have more than one BGP link, the other links gain higher priority and your packets are automatically rerouted via the alternate paths.
Wikipedia defines BGP as "The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the protocol backing the core routing decisions on the Internet. It maintains a table of IP networks or 'prefixes' which designate network reachability among autonomous systems (AS). It is described as a path vector protocol. BGP does not use traditional Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) metrics, but makes routing decisions based on path, network policies and/or rulesets. For this reason, it is more appropriately termed a reachability protocol rather than routing protocol."
In Fiji, the situation until recently (a month ago) is that FINTEL is connected (via the Southern Cross Cable) to the Internet backbone via BGP and is providing, static routes (non BGP) to the various ISPs (CONNECT, UNWIRED, KIDANET, VODAFONE, DIGICEL). Additionally, USP, the University of the South Pacific, with is main campus in Suva, Fiji, has its own Internet link to AARNET. USP is not connected locally to FINTEL. Internet packets from a student at home, have to go via Australia to reach an online courseware in the University, just across the road. USP also installed a Root Server on its network, this root server is only connected to USP network and therefore does not benefit any other ISP in Fiji.
A month ago, TFL, Telecom Fiji Limited (CONNECT parent company) got access to the Southern Cross Cable and set up its own link to the Internet via the ASN 45349, but as of today, FINTEL, TFL, USP are still not interconnected.
At the moment, none of these entities offer BGP peering, to any organization in Fiji. Why would you want BGP, static routes are more than enough, is the common question when asked about BGP peering in Fiji. BGP is a protocol that allows redundancy and reliability. It self configures depending on network conditions. Having more than one peering point, allows better operation, less downtime, etc... This is very important for the development of the Internet economy in Fiji, opening a wide range of operations and local content.
How can you get therefore reliability, and redundancy using BGP when no local ISPs offers you BGP Peering?
The answer is tunnels. Using the same method to get IPv6 when you local provider does not have native IPv6, you establish an IPv6 tunnel over IPv4 to a remote host. Here the trick is to create a tunnel, to make two peers look like next to each others. You then move IPv4 over IPv4. The whole tunnel is considered as a link (like a phone line, or DSL link), BGP can then run on top of this link, and provide the same capabilities as if the link was a physical link between two modems. You then use at the other end a remote router, which has BGP peering to the rest of the Internet, establish a tunnel from your office router to this router and then BGP peer with it. However you need to be careful that the route advertisement do not overwrite the route that allows the tunnel to function. Therefore on each router, you enter a static route to indicate the other end of the tunnel is not reached via the tunnel but via the local link. Because this route is more specific it will have priority over more generic routes.
It is indeed a cumbersome set up, but it has proven very reliable for our AS55327, it has also reduced drastically our downtime, and network reconfigurations each time one of our ISPs is down, making a breeze to operate a Network Operating Centre in Fiji. Until local ISPs offer BGP peering to finally fulfill the objectives of becoming the Internet hub of the Pacific, development in Internet in Fiji will be very limited. Call Centers, Data Centers, Internet Exchange points, Education (cf lack of peering with USP), local hosting, Content Delivery Network (CDN), will be very difficult to be established without this fundamental block.
In a paper at http://www.caida.org/publications/presentations/2006/wealthofnetworks/ Tom Vest, Internet Economist at CAIDA and OECD correlates the wealth of an economy to the wealth of networks and the number of ASN an economy has.
http://www.avonsys.com/blog3
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