Rating IX, year 2017
As you know, over time a large number of local and geographically distributed points and networks of traffic exchange began to appear on the territory of the Russian Federation (hereinafter, I will refer to them as IX), currently there are more than 37 of them: large, small, regional or cooperating home networks for exchange intranet resources.
How are they all different?
In this article I will try to compare the largest and most famous traffic exchange points that have gone beyond the boundaries of my home region and are heard by almost all telecom operators.
Here is a list of these interesting points that have reached maturity and are considered significant within the Runet:
IX.RU (AS 8631)
SFO-IX (AS 13094)
FIORD-IX (AS 28917)
CLOUD-IX (AS 29076)
GLOBAL-IX (AS 31500 )
W-IX (AS 50384)
DATAIX (AS 50952)
Only I will not compare them according to “summary graphs”, “profits”, “subscriber inflow and outflow” and similar amorphous factors, as some respected publications do. And according to other, more technically interesting criteria.
Criteria:
availability of public Looking Glass + 10 points;
the presence of public statistics charts +10 points;
described in RIPE-DB BGP community +10 points;
the number of included autonomous systems +1 point for each AS;
the number of unique included autonomous systems +1 point for each AS.
Excuse: That representatives IX was not so offensive, I sorted them by the used number of the autonomous system (AS).
IX.RU is a group of classic intracity IX, not combined with each other. Legal entity JSC “CVKS“ MSC-IX ”, specialization IX.
The very first IX, founded within the Russian Federation, has recently become owned by Rostelecom, and it is not clear how much this will affect it in the future.
The total amount of traffic at the moment is 2.3 Tbps / s, but it’s not entirely clear, are these statistics only MSK-IX or the total statistics of all IX groups? Unfortunately, I did not find separate general statistics for each of the traffic exchange points on ix.ru.
This group includes the following city
IXs : MSK-IX, AS8631, Moscow
EKT-IX, AS43213, Ekaterinburg
NSK-IX, AS42403, Novosibirsk
SPB-IX, AS43690, St. Petersburg
SMR-IX , AS47882, Samara
RND-IX, AS48216, Rostov-on-Don
VLV-IX, AS48531, Vladivostok
KZN-IX, AS50706, Kazan
Traffic is exchanged in a common peer-to-peer VLAN for each city, there is no connectivity between cities.
On site IX, the looking glass service is present, in RIPE-DB all included operators and information on the managers of the BGP community are described.
Further information on the participants of these traffic exchange points, but I immediately excluded some of them from the review. Those where the number of participants is less than 20:
MSK-IX number of AS: 434 present only on this IX AS: 163
EKT-IX number of AS: 45 present only on this IX AS: 7
NSK-IX number of AS: 48 present only on this IX AS: 18
SPB-IX the number of AS: 89 present only on this IX AS: 5
other urban IX groups are insignificant (no more than 20 participants), therefore we will not consider them yet.
Geographically distributed IX, owned by the Novosibirsk telecom operator LLC Milekom, the main specialization of the operator is IP transit, lease of communication channels.
Famous points of presence are in the cities of Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk.
There is a graph of the total traffic on the site, but it doesn’t work, for some reason there is a strange link to zabbix with ip 192.168.122.179
Looking glass is present, but it leads to the Milek website, and the main BGP community controllers are described in RIPE-DB.
The number of AS 91 present only on this IX 42.
The geographically distributed IX owned by the Moscow telecommunication operator STC Fiord CJSC, the main specialization of the operator is IP transit and data center services.
Famous points of presence are in the cities of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev.
Unfortunately, on the website of this telecom operator there is no information about the total traffic inside IX, the Fiord employees could not provide data, the public looking glass service in this IX is missing. Also, this IX is not public.
Due to the lack of a public service, looking glass had to analyze this traffic exchange point by parsing received routes using the BGP protocol, where the first AS in the AS-PATH attribute was taken as a participant in this IX.
According to the data obtained, the number of included ASs is at least 131, of which 76 are present only on this IX.
Geographically distributed IX, owned by the Moscow telecom operator Filanko LLC. The main specialization of the operator is IP transit and data center services under the datahouse.ru brand. The points of presence declared on the site IX are in the cities of Frankfurt, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Voronezh, Kiev, Kharkov.
This IX is not a traditional point or network of traffic exchange. The technology is such that, in addition to internal connectivity, this network announces the prefixes of its participants to other IX and global routing tables. In some cases, this leads to problems, complicates their solution and causes inconvenience in traffic management.
This IX does not have a public graph of total load.
The looking glass service is present, and RIPE-DB describes marking and managing communities.
The number of included AS 227 present only on this IX 70.
Geographically distributed IX, owned by the St. Petersburg communications operator LLC Globalnet. The main specialization of the operator is IP transit, rental of communication channels.
The points of presence declared on the site IX are in the cities of Stockholm, Helsinki, Moscow, St. Petersburg.
IX does not have a public graph of the total load, the looking glass service is present, but does not provide sufficient information, it is somewhat cropped. Information about the BGP community used in RIPE-DB is also missing.
I had to analyze and search again for the participants of this IX by parsing the received routes using the BGP protocol from IX route servers (similar to Fiord).
According to the data obtained, it turned out that the number of included ASs is at least 84, of which are present only on this IX 16.
The geographically distributed network IX, owned by the Moscow telecom operator LLC Aykhome. The main specialization of the operator is IP transit, data transmission channels.
Famous points of presence are in the cities of Moscow, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Kiev, Vladimir, Cheboksary, Kazan, Ufa, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Tyumen, Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Voronezh, Samara, Saratov, Permian.
The principle is exactly the same as that of CLOUD-IX described above.
The total amount of transit traffic currently through this IX is 1.5Tbit / s traffic.
It was not possible to find a public looking glass on w-ix, but there are marking and managing communities in RIPE-DB.
The number of AS 172 present only on this IX 66.
Geographically distributed IX, owned by Peering LLC. Operator specialization - traffic exchange network.
Famous points of presence in the cities of Frankfurt, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Ufa, Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, Belgorod, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa.
This network is a classic network / traffic exchange point where data is exchanged only between participants IX, without the announcements of routes of participants to the 3rd party.
The total amount of transit traffic through this IX is approximately 2.4 Tbit / s, almost 1 in 1 with MSK-IX.
looking glass for this IX is present, available at lg.dataix.ru.
in RIPE-DB, all included operators are described in detail, information on the marking and managing bgp community is present.
Number of AS: 362 present only on this IX 121.
Well, further information for lovers of beautiful graphics:
From all the information collected, the following conclusions are drawn:
- It is necessary to make such comparisons annually and look at the trend for a change in Runet connectivity;
- Feels like: not very popular traffic exchange points quite compete with larger ones, such as IX.ru or DataIX;
- Traffic exchange points need more publicity, statistics on the site, a more detailed description of the information in RIPE-DB, public looking-glass is required.
Which IX to connect to, I will not advise, decide for yourself.
How are they all different?
In this article I will try to compare the largest and most famous traffic exchange points that have gone beyond the boundaries of my home region and are heard by almost all telecom operators.
Here is a list of these interesting points that have reached maturity and are considered significant within the Runet:
IX.RU (AS 8631)
SFO-IX (AS 13094)
FIORD-IX (AS 28917)
CLOUD-IX (AS 29076)
GLOBAL-IX (AS 31500 )
W-IX (AS 50384)
DATAIX (AS 50952)
Only I will not compare them according to “summary graphs”, “profits”, “subscriber inflow and outflow” and similar amorphous factors, as some respected publications do. And according to other, more technically interesting criteria.
Criteria:
availability of public Looking Glass + 10 points;
the presence of public statistics charts +10 points;
described in RIPE-DB BGP community +10 points;
the number of included autonomous systems +1 point for each AS;
the number of unique included autonomous systems +1 point for each AS.
Excuse: That representatives IX was not so offensive, I sorted them by the used number of the autonomous system (AS).
IX.RU
IX.RU is a group of classic intracity IX, not combined with each other. Legal entity JSC “CVKS“ MSC-IX ”, specialization IX.
The very first IX, founded within the Russian Federation, has recently become owned by Rostelecom, and it is not clear how much this will affect it in the future.
The total amount of traffic at the moment is 2.3 Tbps / s, but it’s not entirely clear, are these statistics only MSK-IX or the total statistics of all IX groups? Unfortunately, I did not find separate general statistics for each of the traffic exchange points on ix.ru.
This group includes the following city
IXs : MSK-IX, AS8631, Moscow
EKT-IX, AS43213, Ekaterinburg
NSK-IX, AS42403, Novosibirsk
SPB-IX, AS43690, St. Petersburg
SMR-IX , AS47882, Samara
RND-IX, AS48216, Rostov-on-Don
VLV-IX, AS48531, Vladivostok
KZN-IX, AS50706, Kazan
Traffic is exchanged in a common peer-to-peer VLAN for each city, there is no connectivity between cities.
On site IX, the looking glass service is present, in RIPE-DB all included operators and information on the managers of the BGP community are described.
Further information on the participants of these traffic exchange points, but I immediately excluded some of them from the review. Those where the number of participants is less than 20:
MSK-IX number of AS: 434 present only on this IX AS: 163
EKT-IX number of AS: 45 present only on this IX AS: 7
NSK-IX number of AS: 48 present only on this IX AS: 18
SPB-IX the number of AS: 89 present only on this IX AS: 5
other urban IX groups are insignificant (no more than 20 participants), therefore we will not consider them yet.
SFO-IX
Geographically distributed IX, owned by the Novosibirsk telecom operator LLC Milekom, the main specialization of the operator is IP transit, lease of communication channels.
Famous points of presence are in the cities of Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk.
There is a graph of the total traffic on the site, but it doesn’t work, for some reason there is a strange link to zabbix with ip 192.168.122.179
Looking glass is present, but it leads to the Milek website, and the main BGP community controllers are described in RIPE-DB.
The number of AS 91 present only on this IX 42.
FIORD-IX
The geographically distributed IX owned by the Moscow telecommunication operator STC Fiord CJSC, the main specialization of the operator is IP transit and data center services.
Famous points of presence are in the cities of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev.
Unfortunately, on the website of this telecom operator there is no information about the total traffic inside IX, the Fiord employees could not provide data, the public looking glass service in this IX is missing. Also, this IX is not public.
Due to the lack of a public service, looking glass had to analyze this traffic exchange point by parsing received routes using the BGP protocol, where the first AS in the AS-PATH attribute was taken as a participant in this IX.
According to the data obtained, the number of included ASs is at least 131, of which 76 are present only on this IX.
CLOUD-IX
Geographically distributed IX, owned by the Moscow telecom operator Filanko LLC. The main specialization of the operator is IP transit and data center services under the datahouse.ru brand. The points of presence declared on the site IX are in the cities of Frankfurt, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Voronezh, Kiev, Kharkov.
This IX is not a traditional point or network of traffic exchange. The technology is such that, in addition to internal connectivity, this network announces the prefixes of its participants to other IX and global routing tables. In some cases, this leads to problems, complicates their solution and causes inconvenience in traffic management.
This IX does not have a public graph of total load.
The looking glass service is present, and RIPE-DB describes marking and managing communities.
The number of included AS 227 present only on this IX 70.
GLOBALNET-IX
Geographically distributed IX, owned by the St. Petersburg communications operator LLC Globalnet. The main specialization of the operator is IP transit, rental of communication channels.
The points of presence declared on the site IX are in the cities of Stockholm, Helsinki, Moscow, St. Petersburg.
IX does not have a public graph of the total load, the looking glass service is present, but does not provide sufficient information, it is somewhat cropped. Information about the BGP community used in RIPE-DB is also missing.
I had to analyze and search again for the participants of this IX by parsing the received routes using the BGP protocol from IX route servers (similar to Fiord).
According to the data obtained, it turned out that the number of included ASs is at least 84, of which are present only on this IX 16.
W-ix
The geographically distributed network IX, owned by the Moscow telecom operator LLC Aykhome. The main specialization of the operator is IP transit, data transmission channels.
Famous points of presence are in the cities of Moscow, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Kiev, Vladimir, Cheboksary, Kazan, Ufa, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Tyumen, Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Voronezh, Samara, Saratov, Permian.
The principle is exactly the same as that of CLOUD-IX described above.
The total amount of transit traffic currently through this IX is 1.5Tbit / s traffic.
It was not possible to find a public looking glass on w-ix, but there are marking and managing communities in RIPE-DB.
The number of AS 172 present only on this IX 66.
DATAIX.RU
Geographically distributed IX, owned by Peering LLC. Operator specialization - traffic exchange network.
Famous points of presence in the cities of Frankfurt, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Ufa, Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, Belgorod, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa.
This network is a classic network / traffic exchange point where data is exchanged only between participants IX, without the announcements of routes of participants to the 3rd party.
The total amount of transit traffic through this IX is approximately 2.4 Tbit / s, almost 1 in 1 with MSK-IX.
looking glass for this IX is present, available at lg.dataix.ru.
in RIPE-DB, all included operators are described in detail, information on the marking and managing bgp community is present.
Number of AS: 362 present only on this IX 121.
Summary table
Well, further information for lovers of beautiful graphics:
From all the information collected, the following conclusions are drawn:
- It is necessary to make such comparisons annually and look at the trend for a change in Runet connectivity;
- Feels like: not very popular traffic exchange points quite compete with larger ones, such as IX.ru or DataIX;
- Traffic exchange points need more publicity, statistics on the site, a more detailed description of the information in RIPE-DB, public looking-glass is required.
Which IX to connect to, I will not advise, decide for yourself.