Dark Fibre Cross Border Connections in Central Europe SANET experience

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Dark Fibre Cross Border Connections in Central
Europe SANET experience

• Pavol Horváth, Marian Durkovic, Tibor Weis

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Background

• NREN networks evolved to gigabit speeds
• Users expect fast downloads from ALL internet
  resources, especially from neighbor countries
• GÉANT provides high-bandwidth connections between
  NRENs
• but it might be lt 10 of NRENs external IP
  traffic

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Performance Limiters

• Some ISPs have small international bandwidth
• however their connection to the local exchange
  point is usually much better
• High RTT is very serious problem
• transit providers might peer at other side of
  Europe
• RTTs gt 50 msec to neighbor country not uncommon
• it means that packets travel more than 5000 km
• not possible to tune TCP stacks of all servers
  and users

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High RTT Example

• Available paths to Telecom PL
• 1 - BT, Telia
• 15 hops, 52 msec
• 2 - Sprint, FT
• 17 hops, 56 msec

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C-B-C Motivation

• Every terrestrial transport uses the shortest
  path
• look at roads, railways, power distribution etc.
• Lets do the same with IP networks
• essential to get to the foreign exchange points
• Neighbor NRENs are already there
• and usually have some POP quite close to the
  border
• So only short piece of dark fibre is needed
• no international circuit pricing

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C-B-C Milestones

• August 2002
• SK-AT, dark fibre 110 km, gigabit ethernet
• April 2003
• SK-CZ, DF 10090 km, GE, repeater on the border
• August 2004
• CZ-PL, DF 115 km, GE, idea discussed on CEF
  Workshop
• EoMPLS tunnel via CESNET for SK-PL peering

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Technical Solution

• NREN networks connected by dark fibre
• Transport 802.1q ethernet trunks
• native support for L2 services
• Traffic exchange between connected NRENs
• better RTTs than via GÉANT
• All NREN prefixes announced to exchange points in
  neighbor countries
• to AS-SANETSIXPEERS announce AS-SANET AS-ACONET
  AS-CESNET AS-PLNET

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C-B-C Economy

• IP transit costs EUR/Mbps/month
• Cross border connection
• 120 km of DF 4000 EUR/month
• with GE its 4 EUR/Mbps/month
• with 10GE it would be 0.4 EUR/Mbps/month
• Significantly lower costs for much better service
• Possibility to use also for IP transit / backup

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Experiences

• CBC traffic much higher than expected
• users learn and prefer fast resources
• new services appeared
• External traffic split into more links
• better redundancy
• No growth of IP transit traffic during last year
• increase of peering CBC traffic share
• Current status
• 2/3 of external traffic via peerings CBC

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External Traffic
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Progress in 2005

• Attempt to configure full mesh between CE NRENs
  and CE internet exchange points
• traffic PIONIER-gtAT approx. 800 Mbps
• traffic CESNET-gtAT approx. 300 Mbps
• Definitely interesting for participants
• might convert 2 Gbps of IP transit traffic to
  peerings
• But not possible via current GE links

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Future Plans

• Upgrade to 10GE or DWDM
• Direct connection SK-PL
• Extend to remaining neighbor countries (HU, UA)
• Develop transit model for third countries
• Introduce new networking ideas

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C-B-C Conclusions

• Technically feasible
• much better access to resources in neighbor
  countries
• several possibilities to improve redundancy
• Economically feasible
• converting IP transit traffic to peerings
• improving competition in IP transit market
• New platform for cooperation between NRENs
• very important for future developments

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• Time for your questions