State of the Internet

This text originally appeared in Arcep‘s 4th annual report ‘The state of the Internet in France’.

LEADING THE INTERNET SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Telia Carrier’s global Internet backbone, AS1299, accounts for nearly 60 percent of global Internet routes. Being a leader in its field entails plenty of responsibilities. For us, it implies duties for every customer, everywhere and one of these duties includes Internet routing security and stability. In the corporate world, this is called social responsibility. In our Internet ecosystem, this is called RPKI (Resource Public Key Infrastructure) and Telia Carrier is the first Tier1 service provider to have implemented it on a global scale, for both peers and customers, in February 2020.

RPKI is a mechanism by which IP resource owners can ensure that they provide an authoritative list of allowable upstreams to the world. This helps the BGP announcement route validation and filtering of every provider, therefore preventing BGP hijacks (illegitimate advertisement of foreign address or AS number space, intentionally or not) and route leaks (illegitimate announcement of a route received from a peer/upstream to another one). Although not a new technology, RPKI has struggled, like IPv6, with poor uptake across resource owners and network operators. With our new global scale achievement and the unanimous acclamation received from our customers, both content providers and eyeballs, we believe many others will join us during 2020.

ALWAYS GETTING AHEAD OF THE GROWTH CURVE

AS1299 represents over 2,000 direct customers, plus around 30 direct peers. The total traffic of +60 Tbps is spread over 150 edge devices, resulting into nearly 10,000 BGP sessions. During 2019, we deployed more than 10,000 new 100GE ports. Increasing its agility while decreasing its costs, with the challenge of global scale, is not new for network providers. The change in today’s reality is that networks need not only to plan the constant appetite for on-demand, unlimited and high-quality capacity required for 5G, streaming, gaming and always-on connections, but also to act fast and support its users in all situations.

The ongoing standardization of 400GE coherent technologies incentivizes new, simplified and partially disaggregated IP over DWDM architectures. Our ambition became to spearhead that wave with open optical line systems across several continents. In February 2020, we started the deployment of our new network architecture with unparallel network density, from 1GE all the way to 400GE, with cloud scale routing technology. More value has shifting to software, hardware cycles have become shorter and ongoing 400G standardization is poised to finally disrupt the optical networking market.

Jorg Dekker,
Head of Internet Services

Read the full report here: ‘The state of the Internet in France‘ (2020)