Internet Peering Conflicts
The big news in internet circles right now is the recent decision by Mweb, put into practice yesterday, to stop peering with any service provider who charges for local peering.
Peering is similar to the concept of cell phone interconnect charges, in which large ISP’s (internet service providers) with their own backbone networks agree to allow traffic from other ISP’s over their network, in exchange for traffic on those ISP’s networks. And for a fee of course.
Cutting these peering ties means that Mweb, and all its customers, will have no links to networks run by ISP’s like Vodacom, MTN or Telkom, and traffic will have to be routed internationally.
Mweb ISP CEO, Derek Hershaw, explained, “We will simply be rerouting traffic away from congested – and very expensive – local transit links to our international bandwidth, which is significantly cheaper and not congested.”
This is part of a larger drive on Mweb’s part, first hinted at by their CEO Rudi Jansen, when Mweb launched their uncapped service earlier this year.
The Internet Could Be Cheaper
“Peering and the IPC cost is the biggest killer of the internet in this market. If those costs are reduced, we’ll see costs come down even further,” Jansen said in an interview in March. “The government needs to get involved and invest in infrastructure. The issue is not international anymore. (International) prices are 40% cheaper than local lines. That’s scary.”
Their ISP CEO explained that MWEB hoped that ISPs would peer without charging, thereby lowering costs for people accessing the internet in South Africa.
“Hopefully we establish a principal where all ISPs peer on an open basis…where you hand the traffic over at the closest point to where it is hosted,” he said.
Internet Service Providers Not Convinced
MTN, Vodacom and Telkom have so far not responded publicly, and at the moment, nobody quite knows what will happen, or whether they will agree to Mweb’s free peering requirement.
What is known is that Mweb will no longer be paying peering charges. This doesn’t mean that they will refuse traffic from other local ISP’s, but simply that all such traffic will be routed on their cheaper, international bandwidth, travelling out of the country, and then back in, bypassing the peering between networks.
This has resulted in companies like Hetzner warning their clients that they may experience slow connections to Hetzner servers hosted in South Africa, if they use Mweb to connect to the internet.
Connection Problems Already Apparent
From yesterday, we’ve already received a couple of queries about this, with clients who use an Mweb connection, struggling to access their websites. Although at least one of our clients was unable to access their website at all yesterday, this problem should be partially resolved, as Mweb has now rerouted non-peering traffic out of the country. This will lead to slow load times for any sites on networks which do not peer with Mweb, but the sites should be accessible.
Unfortunately, there is literally nothing that we can do about it. We’ve been in contact with MTN Business, and they lay the blame squarely on Mweb, who, they say, has decided to stop peering with all ISPs.
The MTN Business SME sales manager who spoke to us explained that MTN Business takes no responsibility for any problems accessing websites, and stating that any problems are due to individual users choice of service provider.
Mweb, on the other hand, claims that there is an easy solution: Peer with Mweb for free.
Hershaw explained that MWEB is eager to peer with all ISPs free of charge at the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX) and/or the Cape Town Internet Exchange (CINX), and stated that this is what he hopes will happen.
He added that a number of ISPs are already peering with MWEB, including Vox Telecom (DataPro), Neology and Cybersmart, and there will hence be no impact on them due to the cutting of transit links.
The Technical Stuff
If you’re interested in the technicalities of peering and transit links, the following information comes courtesy of our development team. If you’re not, you can skip down to the conclusion.
Different networks on the Internet are known as Autonomous Systems. Each Network is assigned an Autonomous System Number by a central registry (AfriNIC/Arin/RIPE).
The following is a simplified explanation of how peering and transit links work:
Lets assume there are 3 networks:
AS1
AS2
AS3
Imagine that AS1 peers with AS2
AS1 — link — AS2
And AS3 peers with AS2
AS3 — link — AS2
But AS3 and AS1 do not peer.
AS2 will have policies in place which prevents traffic from AS1 getting to AS3 (and the other way around), because its not in their interest to carry that traffic on behalf of AS1 and AS3, since it costs AS2 money to carry that traffic on their own infrastructure. Unless AS3 starts paying AS2 to carry their traffic to AS1, it will become a Transit service, requiring an additional service to carry traffic from one network to another, bypassing the network that is not peering.
In Summary:
Peering = Traffic between two AS numbers, where these AS’ peer directly with each other.
Transit = Traffic between two AS numbers, where these AS’ do not peer directly, and they require one or more intermediate AS to carry the traffic.
In Conclusion
It’s hard to say what the outcome will be until the other big ISPs release policy statements regarding their intentions. We hope that this will be another step toward more affordable, accessible internet in South Africa.
If you’re having trouble accessing your site through Mweb at the moment, you can rest assured that there is nothing wrong with your site. The problem lies with your service providers ability to connect you to it, not the site or server itself, and many users will be unaffected.
