RIPE, Europe's Internet governance body, opposes a proposal to reshape basic Internet protocols supported by the Chinese government, Chinese telecommunications companies and network equipment provider Huawei.

The proposal, called "New IP", is a reworked version of the TCP/IP standards to support new technologies. It includes a "shutdown protocol" to shut down faulty parts of the Internet and a new governance model that centralizes the Internet and puts it in the hands of a few critical node operators.

Submitted last year to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and published last month by the Financial Times, the new proposal immediately drew criticism. To the general public and privacy advocates, it is an obvious attempt to hide Internet censorship features behind a technical overhaul of the TCP/IP protocol stack.

In short, an attempt by the Chinese government to export and impose its autocratic views on the rest of the Internet and its infrastructure. Especially since several countries such as Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia have given their support.

On its blog, the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, West Asia and the former USSR, RIPE NCC, has officially spoken out against China's new IP proposal.

Marco Hogewoning, acting director of public policy and Internet governance at RIPE NCC, says "Do we need New IP? I don't think we do. [...] Although there are some technical challenges with the current Internet model, I don't think we need a new architecture to solve them."

Any attempt to overhaul Internet protocols should be left to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and not the ITU, where political influence is more important than technically sound arguments, he said. RIPE is also concerned about the desire to change the decentralized nature of the Internet.

The organization expressed its concerns in a paper sent to the ITU in February this year: "RIPE NCC is deeply concerned about what has been proposed here.[...] We are particularly concerned that this proposal represents an opportunity to move away from the traditional 'bottom-up' decision-making model. We also believe that the technical justification presented is flawed and find the alternative designs suggested to be both unrealistic and unproven".

With the new proposal due to enter the test phase in 2021, Hogewoning urges national Internet governance organizations to contact local decision-makers and recommend voting against it as well as a vote at a later date.

 Read the article

Source : ZDNet

On November 25th, 2019 at 3:35 p.m., the RIPE NCC made its last IPv4 /22 allocation. The organization is now short of IPv4 addresses. An announcement that comes as no surprise to network operators: the RIPE community has long anticipated and planned the exhaustion of IPv4. Indeed, the RIPE NCC has been able to provide thousands of new networks with /22 allocations through responsible management of these resources by the community.

Even if there are no more IPv4 addresses, RIPE NCC will continue to retrieve them. These will come from organizations that have ceased operations or closed, or from networks sending back addresses that they no longer need. These addresses will be assigned to members (LIR) based on their position on a new waiting list that is now active. Only LIRs who have never received an IPv4 allocation from the RIPE NCC can request addresses on the waiting list, and they can only receive one allocation /24. However, these small amounts of recovered addresses will not be close to the millions of addresses that networks need today.

This event is another step towards the global exhaustion of the remaining IPv4 address space. The emergence of an IPv4 transfer market and the increased use of Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) in recent years does not solve the underlying problem: there are not enough IPv4 addresses for everyone.

Without large-scale IPv6 deployment, there is a risk of moving towards a future where the growth of the Internet will be unnecessarily limited due to a shortage of unique network identifiers. There is still a long way to go, and RIPE NCC calls on all stakeholders to play their part in supporting IPv6 deployment.

 Read the article

Source : RIPE NCC

Arcep still estimated, before the summer holidays, that the number of public IPv4 addresses available would allow it to last until March 2020. But since then, requests for allocations have multiplied and the remaining stock is melting like snow in the sun. The exhaustion date is now scheduled.... November 5th, 2019.

After this date, the European RIPE register will switch to a strict rationing mode. Organizations wishing to provide themselves will therefore have to register on the waiting list. If so, they will receive a small range of 256 addresses. For those who already have address ranges, they have almost no chance of receiving this boost. "We will focus on players who have not yet received an IPv4 address allocation," warns Marco Schmidt, head of rule development and internal policy at RIPE.

These addresses will mainly come from companies in bankruptcy. Historical actors who have received a large allocation in the past and who no longer use certain beaches can obviously return them to RIPE. But this case will be quite rare. "IPv4 addresses have become strategic assets. Almost no one will want to part with it," says Vincentus Grinius, CEO of Heficed.

The number of IP address transfers is not expected to increase significantly in the future for the same reasons as seen above. However, the price of the IPv4 address could increase significantly as the offer becomes scarcer. There are currently about twenty bids at the global level on the auction site auctions.ipv4.global. The average purchase price more than doubled from $9 to $21 in three years.

This shortage is already inspiring fraudulent minds who are on the lookout to recover stocks of IPv4 addresses. In recent years, a few hundred cases have already landed on the RIPE offices.
RIPE has therefore strengthened its controls to remedy this situation. More than 600 surveys, twice as many as the previous year, were conducted in 2018. Members are now asked to check regularly that their data is correct and up to date.

However, this will not solve the fundamental problem of shortage. Today, no telecom player can ignore IPv4. Even if IPv6 is developing, this technology only connects about a quarter of the Web. "The Internet will not stop working, but it will stop growing. This shortage will especially affect new entrants and growing players, as they are the ones who need new public IPv4 addresses the most. Either they manage to obtain them on the secondary market, or they will have to share IPv4 addresses with several customers," explains Vivien Guéant, project manager in Arcep's "Open Internet" unit.

This situation is far from neutral for the end user as it affects the quality of service. Indeed, when an operator retrieves IPv4 addresses from an actor located in another country or continent, it may happen that this geographical information is not updated.

Address sharing also has shortcomings since it allows several hundred or even thousands of clients to be connected to a single IPv4 address. And this significantly complicates maintenance for the operator and makes it difficult, if not impossible, to use certain applications "such as peer-to-peer, remote access to shared files on a NAS, access to connected home control systems, certain network games", explains Arcep in its "Monitoring the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses".

The police also suffer from this forced sharing. Investigations will be difficult to complete if addresses are increasingly shared, as it often relies on an IP address to find a digital offender. To overcome this situation, European police forces would like operators and ISPs to reduce the number of customers shared per IPv4 address. In Belgium, for example, the telecoms industry has played the game and the introduction of a code of conduct has made it possible to limit the subscriber ratio to 16:1.

The only long-term solution is the widespread use of IPv6. "Industry players have never seen much interest in IPv6, as this technology had no immediate effects: all websites and customers that have IPv6 also have IPv4. IPv6 is only useful if everyone gets involved. IPv4 will probably have to be kept for a long time to come. Some even think that IPv4 will never stop," adds Vivien Guéant. Unless we do like Belarus, which has just issued a presidential decree requiring these ISPs to deploy IPv6 to all users by 1 January 2020. To date, it is the only country to force the deployment of IPv6 through legislation.

 Read the article

Source : 01net

It is 1990: the Internet has a few million users and the first commercial companies have recently adopted this new distributed infrastructure.

The routing of network traffic from one region to another generally depends on the major transit providers (level 1). These levels 1 are at the top of the hierarchy, composed of a few thousand existing AS, forming what is called the network of networks.

A lot has changed since those early days, when small ASs paid the biggest for connectivity. This dependence on intermediaries has resulted in transit costs, indirect routes, long round trip times and a general lack of control over the quality of service. The bypassing of intermediaries by direct peering interconnections became the obvious answer, and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) then appeared as the default solution for establishing connections.

Between 2008 and 2016, the number of IXPs and members almost tripled. At the same time, accessibility via these facilities has stagnated at around 80% of the announced address space (IPv4) while resilience has increased due to increasing redundancy.

In almost all regions, particularly in Europe and North America, IXP members have grown richer with an increasing number of members and greater accessibility. However, the regional ecosystems were distinct. For example, European IXPs had the largest number of members but the smallest AS (in terms of accessibility), Asia-Pacific was at the opposite extreme.

This growth raises the question of the observable impact of IXPs on the Internet. To answer this question, Queen Mary University in London, in collaboration with researchers from Roma Tre Univ, the GARR Consortium and the University of Tokyo, extracted a large collection of traceroutes covering the same period and identified IXPs crossed.

The IXPs have had a clear impact on reducing the average length of access paths at AS level, particularly for large (hypergiant) global networks. Given that these networks are traffic-intensive, it is likely that a large proportion of Internet traffic has benefited from a substantial reduction in the number of AS crossed.

They have also clearly helped to bypass level 1 transit providers. However, their impact on reducing the number of transit links (not necessarily level 1) visible on the route is more moderate.

Despite these changes, a clear hierarchy remains, with a small number of networks playing a central role. It is interesting to note that there is a small group of very central networks, regardless of whether the paths cross an IXP or not.

In addition, the Internet hierarchy has changed: large central networks have reduced their use of public peerings while IXPs have been adopted by smaller and less central ASs. This is probably due to the increasing popularity of private network interconnections (NIBPs), which are generally favoured by AS when large volumes of traffic are exchanged.

Overall, the increase in the number of IXPs since 2008 has had a clear impact on the evolution of the Internet, shortening paths (mainly) to hypergiants and reducing dependence on Tier 1 transit providers.

The results must be interpreted in the light of the constraints of existing data, and there are a number of areas where work is possible. For example, topological data are independent of traffic volumes and total visibility on the Internet is impossible to achieve.

In addition, content distribution network (CDN) redirection strategies are not included in the traceroutes; it is assumed that accounting for the increasing traffic volumes delivered by these networks would likely support these conclusions.

 Read the article

Source : RIPE

Rezologue, the catalogue of services and training offered and led by our experts, has been revamped!

Rezopole offers you a complete range of solutions to optimize your network performance, improve your technical teams or develop your infrastructures.

Discover this 2019 edition now.

 View the catalogue           Download the catalogue

Rezopole offers companies and local authorities to delegate the management of their BGP infrastructure in order to improve performance and optimise management costs.

This service is intended for any entity, customer or not, of the GIX / NAP services of LyonIX and GrenoblIX.

Find all the details on pages 20 and 21 of Rezologue 2018.

 View the catalogue           Download the catalogue

The maximum number of participants is reached for this session. Thanks to everyone who signed up!

This Rezopole User Group takes place on April 6th from 9:00 am to 12:00 am in our premises (16, rue de la Thibaudière - 69007 Lyon).

The 18th edition focuses on best practices in BGP announcement implementation and filtering.

Program:

  • Breakfast
  • Integrity of reports in the RIPE database (RipeDB):
    - Declaration of intent (RPSL)
    - ASN","INET","ROUTE" objects
    - RPKI
  • Complementary role of PeeringDB:
  • Implementation of peering:
    - Peerer with Route Server
    - Particularity of peering with GAFAM (Peering Direct)
  • The tools around BGP management:
   - BGP session monitoring
   - Web tools: strat.ripe.net, Qrator, BGPmon
  • Consolidation of statistics:
   - ASDIG, Netflow-Sflow tools
  • Round table

The next Rezopole User Group will take place on April 6th, 2018 from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm in our premises (16, rue de la Thibaudière - 69007 Lyon).
 
This edition will focus on best practices in BGP announcement implementation and filtering.

Program:

  • Breakfast
  • Integrity of reports in the RIPE database (RipeDB):
    - Declaration of intent (RPSL)
    - ASN","INET","ROUTE" objects
    - RPKI
  • Complementary role of PeeringDB:
  • Implementation of peering:
    - Peerer with Route Server
    - Particularity of peering with GAFAM (Peering Direct)
  • The tools around BGP management:
   - BGP session monitoring
   - Web tools: strat.ripe.net, Qrator, BGPmon
  • Consolidation of statistics:
   - ASDIG, Netflow-Sflow tools
  • Round table

   I register  

The number of seats is limited!

Please confirm your participation until March 30th.

[French article]

Bits of Networks : Etat des points d'échange Internet en France (extraits)

Qu'est-ce qu'un point d'échange Internet ?

Un point d'échange Internet, ou IXP (Internet eXchange Point), c'est un endroit où plusieurs opérateurs réseau s'interconnectent pour échanger du trafic.

De façon simplifiée, il faut voir ça comme un gros switch Ethernet sur lequel chaque opérateur réseau va se brancher, à l'aide d'un câble RJ45 ou une fibre optique. Oui oui, on parle bien du même genre de switch Ethernet que vous avez sûrement chez vous pour brancher vos ordinateurs, juste un peu plus rapide et fiable (et donc plus cher) [...]

Les IXP permettent de développer le territoire local

Les points d'échange sont importants pour développer le réseau sur le territoire local, puisqu'ils permettent aux opérateurs locaux de s'échanger du trafic directement, sans passer par les gros noeuds d'interconnexion comme Paris, Londres ou Amsterdam. Ça permet de réduire la latence et le coût, et de moins dépendre d'infrastructures qui deviennent critiques de par leur concentration (par exemple TH2 à Paris concentre une grosse partie des interconnexions de l'Internet français...). En somme, décentraliser et relocaliser le réseau, ce qui a des vertus non seulement techniques et économiques, mais également humaines : cela permet aussi de relocaliser les compétences techniques [...]

[…] L'effet de réseau joue : comme pour beaucoup de systèmes en réseau, plus un point d'échange possède de membres, plus il devient intéressant de s'y connecter. En effet, plus de membres présents signifie d'avantage de trafic échangé potentiel, pour le même coût fixe […]

La qualité de service d'un IXP doit être irréprochable

[…] Les opérateurs ont donc naturellement tendance à privilégier les points d'échange bien gérés et fiables. En réponse, les points d'échanges qui veulent subsister et grossir se donnent les moyens d'assurer un service fiable : astreinte 24/24, architecture technique redondée, matériel de pointe, etc.

On assiste donc à la fois à un regroupement des compétences, via des structures comme Rezopole pour éviter de tout réinventer de zéro à chaque IXP, mais aussi à un fort partage de connaissance et d'expérience à plus large échelle, avec le RIPE et EuroIX.

[…] L'ecosystème des points d'échange n'est pas un sujet nouveau, mais il reste fascinant parce qu'il entrelace des problématiques techniques et des relations entre structures parfois très différentes. Il illustre bien le modèle distribué et pair-à-pair qui a fait d'Internet un succès. On peut par ailleurs constater que certains points d'échange sont gérés comme un bien commun !

Si le sujet vous intéresse, le RIPE NCC maintient un blog collaboratif très actif sur des sujets liés à Internet en Europe, notamment les IXP et le peering. Toujours sur RIPE labs, Uta Meier-Hahn écrit régulièrement des articles passionnants sur les enjeux des interconnexions entre opérateurs.

Vous souhaitez en savoir plus, retrouvez ici l'intégralité de cette étude.

A full range of advice, audits and training to support you

in the development of your infrastructures and the optimisation of your technical configurations.

Updated on 22/02/2021

 View the Catalogue           Download the Catalogue

https://www.ripe.net/survey2016

This will not only help the RIPE NCC build a strategy that will best benefit the Internet community in France and throughout our service region, but they will also have a chance to win one of five iPads if they complete the survey. The earlier you do it, the more chances you have to win a prize. We've done it in less than 10 minutes. There are plenty of interesting questions and you might even discover some services of RIPE you didn't knew about.

All the details are in the news item at:
https://www.ripe.net/publications/news/announcements/take-the-ripe-ncc-survey-2016