Where Next for Peering Tech?

400 Gig: Migration & Momentum

On the technology side 400 Gig ports are forecast to proliferate; during the panel we will try to separate the hype from the practical potential. There will be lots of questions: Where is the market for 400 Gig ports? What is the migration path from 100-400? How much of a market is there really? Where do we expect that migration to happen first - on the backbone, in the data centers, at the exchanges? Impetus and Momentum need to be assessed: Who is currently driving change? Is it vendor-driven or is it driven by cloud or content platforms? How would the vendors define the business case for doing it? Where are we currently with standards? With 100 Gig there were competing standards initially, will we face similar challenges here?

Extending the Range

There is also the question of range. The range on 400 Gig at the moment is very low – a maximum reach of 10 km. This will require a very specific architecture to work, but maybe it will change over time. What is the long-term evolution path we need to follow for this to become a long-haul technology?

Automation

What is happening with software around peering and developments in automation. What is the role of APIs in the future? Will we ever get away from the need for face-to-face meetings to a more remote solution, or will we always need the human touch for the big decisions? Automation offers huge efficiency potential, but the benefits and risks need to be carefully balanced.

---

More about Mark

Mark Cooper is Director Connectivity at Interxion. Interxion is a key interconnection hub for the world’s leading businesses. With more than 2000 customers in over 50 data centers accessing over 600 connectivity providers, 21 European Internet exchanges, and most leading cloud and digital media platforms across its footprint, Interxion takes a neutral approach to ensure that customers have the right connectivity to interconnect, transact and grow their businesses. For more information, please visit www.interxion.com

The Internet as a Secure Interconnect Platform

I don’t know if you feel the same way, but as it has become the great economic and technological driver of our era, business Internet sometimes seems to have become a series of tech hypes and buzzwords to the point that it is hard, as they say in English, to see the wood for the trees. Our market is either shrinking, fragmenting, or mushrooming, depending on where you stand. What is clear is that the winners will move fast while the losers will either be paralysed or swallowed up.

Reinventing the Internet

At NL-ix we have always prided ourselves on being innovators, which puts us in a comparatively strong position. We have a unusual depth of expertise and a wealth of current and potential partners. We provide a fairly full stack of interconnection services with a breadth of reach that provides valuable benefits to our customers, whether they are businesses or service providers. But we need to express and package what we have in a clearer way, and our proposition should be that if you add up all the services we provide – and perhaps a few others too at the front end - what you get is a perfectly secure interconnection platform, which is the best internet you can get.

There is more work needed to make this proposition persuasive and we will need to work with other companies to make it work, but the fundamentals are already in place. The key to success is supporting enterprises as they take control of their Internet.

I’ll be looking at the four key quadrants for effective and secure interconnection of a business and discussing the key steps a business needs to take to meet for digital transformation:

1. internal needs; business processes, training
2. external needs; access quality, cloud connections
3. pulling info; APIs, storage and backup, security
4. pushing and publishing info; content and apps


Own your Own Traffic

Would you entrust your critical business processes to a third party? This is what companies do currently with their business-critical traffic. Take DDoS. A significant number of those companies who have come under attack find their ISP blackholing their traffic. Yet ISPs almost never go down, only the customers. If you have the infrastructure in place and the right tools you can selectively turn off and on internet traffic, by country, carrier, or whatever filter you care to add.

Eliminate Complexity

Building your own Internet means that you can give private connections to companies that use your applications. Currently companies go to a huge assortment of service providers, get offered firewalls, and are generally treated as ‘internet consumers’; and in the same way as in the consumer marketplace the marketeers make them scared of the internet in order to sell. If you take back control of the internet you don’t need to be scared because it is faster and better. You have direct connections (one hop max) to all your suppliers, partners, and cloud providers. You can use peering for your specific needs, for instance setting up specialized ports that you can switch on as and when required. Taking this approach eliminates rather than adding to complexity, as your Internet operates like a private LAN where you control who you want to talk to and who you don’t.

---

Jan Paul Decker

NL-ix CTO Jan Paul Decker and his team create next generation software-driven services. He has 15 years of experience in digital media and software production, he has worked on the board of AMS-IX for five years, and he believes that digital transformation begins and ends with deeper customer understanding. Contact Jan Paul: janpaul@nl-ix.net

The Peering Landscape in Russia

Russia is the biggest European market by population with 90 million internet users, and connectivity and interconnection have evolved fast on a number of fronts over the last decade or so. With only 55% penetration there is still lots of potential to grow – (74% population above 12 years old) (German penetration, for instance, is 82%). Peering is changing fast. The industry needs to leverage this opportunity, but there are challenges in the pipeline.

Market Evolution & Issues

Russian telecoms infrastructure and the broader telecoms market have developed relatively fast, particularly as they were not heavy regulated until a few years ago, so internet access in Russia is quite inexpensive with good quality, especially in the western part of the country. Originally the only alternative to the two incumbent carriers Rostelecom and TTK (Transtelecom) had a coverage across the whole country (12000 km from east to west), were the mobile networks (Beeline, MTS, Megafon) who had limited Optical presence in the western part of the country. As a next step the mobile carriers built their own optical backbone across the whole county and started to compete with Rostelecom and TTK on the transit market, including Europe – Asia transit. Then a big step change came when lots of small commercial companies built fiber networks covering a lot of the country. While not of the highest quality, these networks provided cheap wavelength capacity that works well for IP, driving competition up and prices down.

However, in the last 3 or 4 years regulation has increased. The government created new laws ( the Yarovaya Law) making intercept equipment, filtering and so on obligatory, and this will involve R&D, new equipment, and therefore costs. In addition, carriers are required to keep all traffic from all users covering a six month period, and there are extensive trials taking place currently to see how this can be managed.

New Exchange Architectures

Local Internet Exchanges in Russia are no longer local; they are becoming distributed, building pipes between different locations. They were traditionally city-based islands but now they provide remote peering connectivity as well as internet access. As a result the spread of exchanges is improving. The majority of traffic is still to the west and particularly concentrated in the Moscow-St Petersburg corridor, but some of the exchanges now have PoPs farther east in places like Ekaterinburg and Novosibirsk.

This generates plenty of benefits to more remote customers. Where users in somewhere like Ekaterinburg used to have to buy IP transit for all their traffic they can now exchange about half their traffic through peering agreements. It’s more cost-effective, despite the drop in IP transit prices; and it’s also a better level of connectivity, with shorter roundtrip delays.

New Services, New Roles

The new architecture generates new opportunities, and exchanges are also expanding their service portfolios. Many now not only offer remote IXs with connectivity between different cities, but they are also beginning to offer media content – ‘media logistics’ - delivering media channels from all over Russia via an additional VLAN with better quality and reliability. DDoS protection is also beginning to be offered on an additional VLAN, although it may take a while to become popular. Cloud connectivity is next on the list, and will be extremely convenient for customers who can run multiple VLANs off the one port. It’s a fast-moving space, with Internet Exchanges becoming carriers for their customers and carriers becoming Internet Exchanges, and it’s working pretty well.

The Peering Landscape in Russia

Russia is the biggest European market by population with 90 million internet users, and connectivity and interconnection have evolved fast on a number of fronts over the last decade or so. With only 55% penetration there is still lots of potential to grow – (74% population above 12 years old) (German penetration, for instance, is 82%). Peering is changing fast. The industry needs to leverage this opportunity, but there are challenges in the pipeline.

Market Evolution & Issues

Russian telecoms infrastructure and the broader telecoms market have developed relatively fast, particularly as they were not heavy regulated until a few years ago, so internet access in Russia is quite inexpensive with good quality, especially in the western part of the country. Originally the only alternative to the two incumbent carriers Rostelecom and TTK (Transtelecom) had a coverage across the whole country (12000 km from east to west), were the mobile networks (Beeline, MTS, Megafon) who had limited Optical presence in the western part of the country. As a next step the mobile carriers built their own optical backbone across the whole county and started to compete with Rostelecom and TTK on the transit market, including Europe – Asia transit. Then a big step change came when lots of small commercial companies built fiber networks covering a lot of the country. While not of the highest quality, these networks provided cheap wavelength capacity that works well for IP, driving competition up and prices down.

However, in the last 3 or 4 years regulation has increased. The government created new laws ( the Yarovaya Law) making intercept equipment, filtering and so on obligatory, and this will involve R&D, new equipment, and therefore costs. In addition, carriers are required to keep all traffic from all users covering a six month period, and there are extensive trials taking place currently to see how this can be managed.

New Exchange Architectures

Local Internet Exchanges in Russia are no longer local; they are becoming distributed, building pipes between different locations. They were traditionally city-based islands but now they provide remote peering connectivity as well as internet access. As a result the spread of exchanges is improving. The majority of traffic is still to the west and particularly concentrated in the Moscow-St Petersburg corridor, but some of the exchanges now have PoPs farther east in places like Ekaterinburg and Novosibirsk.

This generates plenty of benefits to more remote customers. Where users in somewhere like Ekaterinburg used to have to buy IP transit for all their traffic they can now exchange about half their traffic through peering agreements. It’s more cost-effective, despite the drop in IP transit prices; and it’s also a better level of connectivity, with shorter roundtrip delays.

New Services, New Roles

The new architecture generates new opportunities, and exchanges are also expanding their service portfolios. Many now not only offer remote IXs with connectivity between different cities, but they are also beginning to offer media content – ‘media logistics’ - delivering media channels from all over Russia via an additional VLAN with better quality and reliability. DDoS protection is also beginning to be offered on an additional VLAN, although it may take a while to become popular. Cloud connectivity is next on the list, and will be extremely convenient for customers who can run multiple VLANs off the one port. It’s a fast-moving space, with Internet Exchanges becoming carriers for their customers and carriers becoming Internet Exchanges, and it’s working pretty well.

What could possibly go wrong.

Security through Learning, Sharing, Transforming and Applying

Jair Santanna will be talking about how to solve DDoS attacks on Day Two of the Neutral Peering Days. He was the winner of last year’s hackathon, and, together with NL-IX, he will be coordinating this year’s hackathon ‘What the Hack’ (you can see his photo on the Hackathon home page explaining his team’s winning solution in 2017).

“I’m a passionate cyber security professional. I believe DDoS attack is a problem we can solve as we explore the relationships between elements in the society. It’s a fascinating subject, and it is the area where I am currently expending all my effort.

Collaboration is the key! I’m trying to convince people that the tools I have developed care what is needed for a collaborative solution against DDoS. There are lots of very good technical solutions. I am not inventing a new technical solution. I’m building a platform that allows existing solutions to be even more effective through learning, sharing, transforming and applying. In addition to that I’m trying to convince people to join our efforts together with all the different perspectives and goals. We are definitely making progress, and lately I have been discussing the way forward with Dutch banks, telecoms companies and the police.

The DDoSDB Platform

There is one critical element for solving our problems - DDoS database (DDoSDB.org). This is a platform for helping victims of DDoS attacks, the academic community, and the security community to share and get access to detailed (but anonymous) information on DDoS attacks. Sharing attack information enables comparison with other attacks, facilitates legal attribution, and also improves detection and mitigation strategies.

I want to engage with other solutions in the market at Neutral Peering Days and try to build some interest and momentum. Technically it is easy to detect attacks and mitigate them, but the key to longer-term success is to share this intelligence. The platform is a perfect way to anonymize the identity of the victims while sharing information and I look forward to telling you more about it.”

---

About Jair

Dr. (José) Jair (Cardoso de) Santanna is a lecturer in computer networks, Internet security and big data analysis and currently assistant professor at the University of Twente. He has a passion for public speaking, and recently won an international award as a Scientific Communicator. He believes that while the world of academia produces a lot of excellent solutions it needs to become much more effective at selling them. jairsantanna.com For those that might be attending, Jair will also be speaking at the One Conference 2018: ‘Merging worlds – securing the connected future’ in Den Haag on 2nd and 3rd October.

Interconnection is both the Driver and the Key

Equinix has been leading the charge on Digital Transformation for several years now. Michiel Eielts, Managing Director of Equinix Benelux will be talking about the opportunities and challenges it brings and illustrating this with a range of use cases at the upcoming Neutral Peering Days.

At Equinix we are a neutral partner and an architecture provider, but that does not stop us being an enabler, so that is where we focus our efforts. Whether we are talking to a cloud provider, a carrier, an enterprise or an Internet Exchange we see our role as offering guidance on the road to Digital Transformation reality, and practical support for multicloud hybrid connectivity through products such as the Equinix Cloud Exchange.

The Power of Interconnection

Interconnection is what will drive transformation, and it will, as always, be the key focus of the Neutral Peering Days. At Equinix, we have done a lot of work on quantifying the value of Interconnection, in particular with our annual Interconnection Index. The Index provides a baseline to track, measure and forecast the growth of Interconnection Bandwidth. In 2017 we saw some interesting trends:
• Interconnection Bandwidth is expected to grow at a 45 percent CAGR to reach 5,000 Tbps by 2020, dwarfing Global IP traffic in both growth (24 percent) and volume (855 Tbps).
• It is also growing faster than Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), the legacy model of business connectivity, by a factor of 10x (45 percent to four percent).

Some key trends that are impacting Interconnection growth include:
• Digital Technology Use, which forces the need to support real-time interactions requiring more Interconnection Bandwidth. According to Accenture, digital technology use is projected to add $1.36 trillion in additional economic output in the world’s top 10 economies by 2023.
• Cybersecurity Risk will expand Interconnection consumption as firms increasingly shift to private data traffic exchange to bypass the public Internet and mitigate against digital threats. By 2020, an estimated 60 percent of digital businesses will suffer major service failures as breaches permeate across physical and digital platforms, a statistic which is very relevant to the Security strand at the Neutral Peering Days.

You can download the August 2017 index here, and look out for the 2018 index, which is coming soon.

Equinix on Digital Transformation

The Equinix Interconnections blog contains a lot of good Digital Transformation guidance for enterprises, answering questions such as how colocation fits into your data center strategy; how colocation hubs can optimize your network performance; and most recently how colocation and interconnection enable hybrid multiclouds More on Equinix itself: www.equinix.com

Is it the End of the Line for the Incumbent IX?

It doesn’t take long to become obsolete these days, and in his introduction to this year’s future of peering panel discussion, Jan Hoogenboom will not be pulling his punches.

If Internet Exchanges don’t change their ways, and quickly, they will be dead or irrelevant in under three years. The news is not as bad as it sounds, but it always pays to grab everyone’s attention at the start! As one door closes another door opens, and while the traditional IX model is being undermined, the massive multi-cloud interconnect door is opening, and there is huge opportunity in there for peering. But it simply underlines the fact that the target audience – and the original business model - for exchanges will never be the same again.

The Party’s Over

Historically, Internet Exchanges were very busy places, addressing and connecting a huge multitude of parties. 80% of traffic went to literally hundreds of networks. Not any more. Now 80% of traffic goes to or from just 8 networks. What does that mean for the exchange? Well, if you have a lot of parties you need a lot of wires. Now, with the ‘big guys’ taking all the traffic, you just need 8 cables.

The Price War is Over

Add to this the fact that the price of Transit continues to fall, and it is now bypassing the price of internet peering ports. Most of us remember when peering was 100 times cheaper, so peering was as natural (and almost as cheap) as breathing. Now it’s almost more expensive to peer than transit!

The Crossroads

So everyone is feeling the squeeze. What are the options? As I see it there are three choices:

1. Don’t change, just slim down and get on with it. If you become hugely cost-effective you can still play a role, albeit a niche one. Concentrate on the 20% of traffic for the long tail, while you leave the 80% to the rest.

2. Aim for the 80% as well by focusing on the Content and ISP market in the data centre rich concentrated metro areas. If you want your content to reach every eyeball you still need a metro exchange, and for European coverage from one location you will also need an Internet Exchange. You’ll be competing with PNIs and caches, but PNIs work best where everyone is in just one or two data centers, and caches only work well for cachable content like Netflix with a high hit ratio, so you are in with a fighting chance.

3. Cater for the massive multi-cloud business market, either directly or through partners. As Digital Transformation takes off, enterprises will use more and more cloud apps and instead of one app or a modest multi-cloud approach (5-10) businesses will use dozens of apps, maybe even hundreds. This requires APIs between these apps and businesses will have the hybrid infrastructure in their offices and a huge need for interconnection. The biggest and first ever interconnect platform in the world is the Internet – the way that people did massive interconnection – so the role of the new model Internet Exchanges will be to offer the ability to assert control over that massive multi-cloud internet connection. This model is fundamental to effective Digital Transformation, enabling businesses to take control of their mission-critical interconnection.

I think you can tell which of the options excites me the most, but I won’t go into the full details here so that you come and watch the presentation. Also, please don’t be surprised if my suggestions aren’t met with universal agreement from our Future of Peering panel. Akamai, Interxion, LONAP and BICS will all be there, as well as our own Aydin Yildiz, and every one of them will have a strong opinion and a pile of facts to back it up, which is one of the most entertaining aspects of business forecasting. I hope you will attend, I know I’ll be there!

Interconnection in Africa

Mark Tinka, Head of Engineering at SEACOM, will be kicking off The Neutral Peering Days on Thursday September 13th and wll be speaking about developments in the peering and interconnect landscape in Africa.

It is still early days for peering and local interconnects in much of Africa. When the internet came to the continent all access was satellite-based, so every country required satellite service with very literally no fiber in the ground, meaning very high latency and very low bandwidth with very high prices. Back in 2009 when the SEACOM cables arrived on the eastern and southern coasts of Africa they immediately drove a 95% drop in pricing, and 80% of users moved from satellite to fiber. Two years later another cable was landed on the east coast, then after another two years another landed on the west coast.

Bearing all of this in mind, the peering landscape is not particularly developed.

Developing Data Centers

One area in which infrastructure has been lacking is carrier-neutral data centers. Not having data centers for interconnection and storage has seriously reduced the performance of content. However, during the last few years this infrastructure has grown fast, first in South Africa then in Kenya, and more recently with new data centre build projects in Uganda, with further considerations for Tanzania as well. This has attracted CDNs and other content players. However, there is still a great deal of work to do on data center infrastructure across the rest of Africa - West Africa in particular is still a bit of a black hole.

What this has done is attract the rest of the major content players from outside Africa to come in and deploy their infrastructure. This has gone very well in Kenya and South Africa because of more developed infrastructure and economic growth. Nigeria is also doing well, with a huge eyeball count, although the infrastructure is still somewhat closed off due to a lack of openness in the cable systems that land there.

Peering Concentrations

There are now major peering exchange points in South Africa and Kenya, and there is a huge drive to facilitate interconnection within the regions and to remove dependence on exchanging traffic outside of Africa.

But considering the size of the continent, there is again a huge amount still to do. Only 35.2% of the total African population are connected, as lots of countries do not have the infrastructure to reach and support the submarine cables.

All in all, Eastern and Southern Africa are doing well, but there is a long way to go before Africans will be able to speak to each other at a network level.

---

SEACOM

SEACOM is a submarine cable operator with a network of submarine and terrestrial high-speed fibre-optic cable that serves the east and west coasts of Africa. SEACOM’s reach extends into Europe and the Asia-Pacific via India. The Pan-African network uses bundled backhaul, open access Points of Presence (PoPs) and global partnerships to provide end-to-end wholesale and enterprise connectivity around the world for African and international network and content operator. SEACOM is privately funded, and approximately 75 percent African-owned.

Denmark: The New Northern Hub

Jørn Thorgård, Special Advisor to Invest in Denmark, will be explaining why Denmark is Eu-rope’s new interconnection hotspot, and what it means for the country.

Traditionally Denmark had light data center and backbone infrastructure, nothing like the FLAP (Frankfurt, London Amsterdam, Paris) or Irish markets. But that is all changing fast. There is a data center and interconnectivity boom going on here and there is lots of associat-ed investment in many sectors from construction to software. It’s all new to us, but it is ex-tremely exciting, and we are keen to encourage it.

Hyperscale Drivers

Facebook is now in Odense – only the third such facility outside the USA. Apple is also investing in two major facilities, one in Viborg and the most recent in Aabenraa near the German border. And Facebook and Google are landing their new 108+ Tbps ‘Havfrue’ trans-Atlantic cable in Esbjerg, and Google may build facilities on two site which they acquired in Fredericia and Aabenraa.

Where the Hyperscalers are leading more infrastructure is following. Their investments drove a need for more connections to the USA, Ireland and the Netherlands, so companies started investing in cables to Denmark, including investments from some of the hyperscalers them-selves. Then more companies started to take notice, driving up colocation and interconnec-tion capacity.

The New Power Brokers

We don’t just see data centers as big power consumers, although they do consume a lot. There is also increasing potential for energy reuse – things like recycling of waste heat. En-ergy consumption will increase but it is better from our point of view that they come here where we have a strong renewable focus. We are planning new offshore windmill parks any-way.

Also, the Hyperscalers are investing in green energy both from Denmark and elsewhere. Because of the scale, because they want to be seen as green, and also because they need to build out so fast, they want to finance those projects themselves. They are not looking for subsidies, they are building Nordic renewable capacity – its additional energy, not taking from the existing grid, which is good for the country and the environment.

Stories to Tell

At Neutral Peering Days I will tell a story about the Hyperscalers and why they chose Den-mark; about the sea cables and the transformation they can generate. The Esbjerg area, for instance, could become something like the high-density data center districts in Amsterdam. There are also all sorts of implications for interconnection and peering which I would like to address.

---

Jørn and the Cleantech Team

I am part of the Cleantech Investment in Denmark team which is part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and my focus is exclusively on data center investors. If you want to discuss any projects or have any questions, please email me: jortho@um.dk

ISPs: The DDOS Window is Closing

Pavel Minarik, Chief Technology Officer at Flowmon Networks will be speaking at Neutral Peering Days about the role of flow monitoring in network operation and security.

Here’s a ‘Did you Know?’ about ISP security offerings. It’s not new, but it still applies, so it’s well worth repeating:

---

• 51% of customers would be willing to pay their ISP for a premium service that removes DDoS attack traffic before it is delivered to them
• 35% would allocate 5-10% of their current ISP spend to subscribe to this type of service
• ISPs who offer security services rely on the following technologies:
• 46% divert DDoS traffic through a scrubbing center
• 49% ‘blackhole’ a victim’s traffic.

[Source: FierceMarkets & Corero report, 2016]

---

OK, things have moved on a bit since then, but not a lot. Is there still a mismatch between customer expectations and reality? Yes! The vast majority of enterprises still expect their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to offer better protection from DDoS attacks.

Larger ISPs tend to offer the service, but they tend not to be altogether comprehensive (e.g. on behaviour analysis) and they come with a heavy price-tag, simply because they use old tools. Very few medium-to-small ISPs offer the service at all, due to what are perceived as prohibitive costs.

Traditional use cases are based on network visibility, capacity planning and troubleshooting. However, in my upcoming talk in the ‘Digital Transformation & Security’ strand of Neutral Peering Days I want to show that this technology has much more to offer by using network flow data to focus on security. That means assessing

1. Network behaviour analysis and
2. How data centers can protect themselves and their customers from DDoS.

Sharing the Load

I also want to show that effective services need not come with a huge price – smart cost-efficient deployments are possible. To illustrate how these deployments work, I will be presenting a use case from a Czech ISP that offers not just DDoS protection but also Network Behaviour Analysis. This means you get notice of indicators of compromise which can save you time in mitigating attacks – but with tools in place with which customers can investigate for themselves. It’s collaborative and cost-efficient, because you share the workload as dictated by your budget.

Take It While You Can

I want network operators and service providers to understand how to use this new toolkit. All that is needed is for providers to change their mindset a bit, and customers to change their mindset a bit too. Luckily, the opportunity is still on the ISP side, but if they miss it they could lose a customer to a cloud DDoS protection service. The window is slowly closing on what is a critical tool for customers which is key to customer retention.

More about Flowmon https://www.flowmon.com/en

Bringing the IoT Promise to Life

Wienke Giezeman is on a mission to provide the entire world with a free and open Internet of Things data network, and at Neutral Peering Days he will be explaining how taking an open and collaborative approach to the problem is already accelerating digital transformation round the world. Solving Problems that Don’t Exist…

There is a lot of nonsense talked about IoT. Why would you need an Internet Connected Refrigerator to tell you what you have? Try opening the door! Want a ‘Wifi-enabled slow cooker’? Really??? Far too often with IoT product there’s no problem being solved, just a solution being pushed!

…or Building Solutions by Sharing

A few years ago a friend of mine, now my business partner, showed me an antenna that could connect up to 10,000 things at the same time over a range of up to 20 kilometres – a low-cost device that does not need loads of recharging at the sensor end, and uses open access technology. To work out how to make the best use of this device we went back to the beginning of the internet – how did that work? 1. They created an open language to connect all their local networks together and 2. They invested in the infrastructure at their end to the point that it could meet up.

We started with Amsterdam. We created a common protocol, then sought out businesses in Amsterdam that would buy an antenna. To show what we could do we set up a pilot monitoring project checking which boats were in danger of sinking in the canals. Six weeks later we had ten businesses buying in.

Cities that Solve it Themselves

In a matter of weeks we had created a city-wide mobile network of things. What we had was a model of what cities everywhere can do, so we opened things up to the world. There was a huge amount of interest from other cities from Sydney to Sao Paolo. We shared the protocol, we shared the brand, and it went viral.

A raft of new ideas were generated by our partners in other cities. Like Oxford water height sensors linked to the City administration, or Amersfoort monitoring air quality as a base for campaigning. Now we have 45,000 members in 90 countries with 4500 gateways. Opening up the technology and sharing it is working! Through our platform and content we are now focussing on helping developers build great products. Organisations are building networks and applications by utilizing the open network and the open tools.

Looking Forward to NPD

I’m very excited to be able to present what we’ve done and talk about the future with fellow network builders at the Neutral Peering Days. The vision of NPD and The Things Network are the same - we want to build open, collaborative infrastructure and democratize connectivity so that businesses and communities can flourish.

---

More about Wienke

Wienke Giezeman is the co-founder of The Things Network and a mentor at Rockstart Accelerator. He started his career with KPN but soon after he left the corporate world and founded WappZapp, a video on demand platform providing curated free and paid video. Wienke has been fighting for a free and open internet since he founded Startups for Net Neutrality. Together with a group of people he let the EU Parliament know how important net neutrality is for starting online businesses. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx. You can watch Wienke present at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxuN3p3EvsU and visit the company site https://www.thethingsindustries.com/

Changes in the Peering Landscape

I look forward to joining the Peering Landscape discussion at Neutral Peering Days with representatives from a huge range of exchanges, content providers and colocation providers, and listening to speakers who will be reviewing the full global landscape– Africa, Russia, Asia, and even the Internet in the air. As the Internet evolves, what interests me most is to learn from other people involved in making the Internet what it is today. Hearing from people in different parts of the world is particularly fascinating. The network is global and peering takes place across borders so we need international get-togethers like the Neutral Peering Days to get the full picture.

People are the Key.

The peering landscape is created not just by companies but by a dynamic group of individuals, and what I find personally very interesting is the social and human interaction behind the scenes. People who don’t know how the Internet works might assume that its development is somehow automated, but this is very far from the case, and the social networking aspect of what we do will continue to be vital for the foreseeable future. One point on this that must be made: the diversity of our community and the different perspectives we bring to tackling challenges are vital, but there are still far too few women on the platform. There are lots of women involved in the peering community and this should be reflected in the speaker line-up in an event as wide-ranging and broadly representative as the Neutral Peering Days – I look forward to seeing how we can tackle this over the coming years. Some of the particular changes to the landscape I have noticed recently include:

Membership Boom.

The exhaustion of IPv4 is affecting the Internet landscape. There has been a large increase in the number of RIPE NCC members who are joining to get address space and their own ASNs. Many of these new members are from the Enterprise sector, so it’s likely that the peering community will see these ASNs more and more frequently. This change will perhaps be accompanied by larger users dropping off public exchanges and setting up private peering relationships. Border Management

Governments are becoming much more interested and influential nowadays and they are an increasingly active part of our community – this is demonstrated by their participation in the RIPE Policy Development Process, and we have worked with them to increase their understanding of how the Internet works and the technical community behind it. Like the exchanges, the RIPE NCC is neutral, and while governments have their own agendas that might not be considered “neutral”, we work to maximise cooperation between them and the technical community so that they are working at least from a shared understanding of how the Internet works and how it can serve their needs as well as the needs of the technical community and its stakeholders.

The Changing Exchange Model.

Most exchanges were set up to keep local traffic local and to save member data from long roundtrips. This model appears to be changing: Are some exchanges making a conscious decision to stay small and local, while others expand internationally and branch out? It is hard to say which is the better model. At the same time, a number of exchanges seem to be adding service layers. They are very well placed to provide new services to their members, particularly in the security area, with enhanced routing security, member verification, and so on. These are just a few of the shifts we are seeing in the peering landscape. I look forward to discussing them – and identifying other changes and trends – at the Neutral Peering Days.

More about Mirjam

Find out more about Mirjam Kühne on the RIPE NCC website https://www.ripe.net/about-us/press-centre/publications/speakers/mirjam-kuhne

RPKI for managers

The 400gbps (R)evolution

Dirk van den Borne, Director of Architecture with Juniper Networks, will be giving a talk on the evolution to 400GE networking at Neutral Peering Days I have a particular focus on new network architectures, addressing questions like how routers and optical transport equipment will be used in the next few years and how is technology evolving across EMEA. One of the key questions is how are we evolving our networks from 100 Gig towards 400 Gig? This next generation of technology will definitely create opportunities for how you build your network, but how is it shaping up?

Round the Next Bend

First of all, there is a bit of futurology involved: Not a single 400GE port has been deployed yet. The IEEE finished their standardization work end of last year, so now the system vendors are finishing the development of their 400GE capable products and start with the first field trials. Things will pick up next year.

Scale & Multi-layer integration

The industry is currently developing the 400GE ecosystem, which promises to scale to massive platform capacities – we will be looking at line cards and 1RU platforms with more than 10 Terabit very soon. This creates lots of opportunities to optimize IP networks for power and footprint, and build the next-generation of converged network architectures. It is therefore highly relevant to understand already today what needs to be considered when deploying 400GE technology over the next few years. We will review what is happening across the industry in terms of 400GE standardization and development, and how this impacts network architectures.

Aside from the massive bandwidth of next-generation platforms and the development of 400GE optical interfaces itself, a key consideration will be the integration between different network layers. When I have my IP network layer and my optical transport layer – how do I get these two closer to each other in order to simplify and automate network operations? Operators today still often use different platforms that don’t really talk to each other, effectively operating as ships in the night. How do we design network so that they can benefit from integration between both layers, and make sure that these benefits remain when the network evolves over time?

About Dirk

I’m a director of Architecture with Juniper Networks, where I advise operators on their network evolution strategy. I specialize in routing and optical transport, with the focus on building the next-generation of converged IP-optical networks. I’m Dutch but have been based in Munich for quite a few years. This will be my first time at Neutral Peering Days, and I look forward to lots of debates about how interconnection is evolving and how network design and automation can help this happen. oment he is extremely busy designing and implementing the NL-ix automation platform.

The Journey to LON2

Riccardo Verzeni, Senior Software Engineer at LINX will be talking about the challenges and opportunities created by the implementation of the new LINX LON2 network

World First

LON2 uses a disaggregated 100G-ready model deploying EVPN over IP using a leaf and spine topology which enables total automation. The new architecture gives us much greater flexibility because it enables the decoupling of software and hardware. LINX are the first IXP in the world to follow this path, and my presentation will give a general overview of the solution and the overall migration process.

Hardware-Software Decoupling

Where in a traditional solution a single vendor would provide both hardware and software, this new architecture creates a decoupled platform which does not rely only on one vendor. This approach also allows each vendor to concentrate their effort on the service they provide best.

Increased Flexibility

The structure is also flexible – the components are not all in a single switch and can be located in different parts of the data center. Ports can be multihomed, with the same set of ports but distributed across multiple switches or routers. This means that if a particular switch goes down the total port does not go down, delivering a significant increase in reliability.

Learning Curve

The design process started about two years ago. The design, build and consolidation/testing phases have been a constant learning curve, requiring extensive coordination between vendors providing hardware and software and LINX to identify and eliminate the glitches. On the software side the potential for automation is also exciting, and we are aiming to contribute to an open source project called NAPALM – an API for managing network devices - implementing the library which interacts with LON2 devices operating system. NAPALM already supports a number of vendors, and the number is growing.

Sectoral Savings

LINX were the first to move to the disaggregated model and we think it is likely that others will follow, creating a new standard from a technical perspective. As most of you will know, LINX is a non-profit business, owned by members, and it was a major commitment to take on the overhead and risks of doing something altogether new. However, our members and our team are very pleased with the results, not least because the LON2 design has generated significant costs savings. The cost to the customer for a port on LON2 has decreased by 40%, so following the same road at other exchanges may generate even greater savings for other exchanges.

---

Watch & Learn

You can watch a video here of LINX Chief Technology Officer, Richard Petrie, and LINX Lead Architect, Flemming Heino, explaining the process in detail including why LINX decided to implement a disaggregated model.

New approaches to secure optical networks Download Ulrich's presentation

Through the Looking Glass

Matthias Hannig will be talking about the Alice, your friendly BIRD looking glass, at this year Neutral Peering Days Alice is a BGP looking glass designed to communicate with multiple BGP routing demons – mainly the birdwatcher API for BIRD. The looking glass is a handy way for IXP customers to debug or gain troubleshooting info if something goes wrong, a route is not announced etc. or to see why a prefix was filtered or rejected.

The tool was originally the product of the winning team, that I was part of, at the RIPE IXP Tools Hackathon just prior to RIPE73 in Madrid. Barry O’Donovan suggested that we create a demon to provide an API for the Bird router server, to be consumed by a looking glass. So Alice started out as a first client for his implementation of the Bird API, which can now be found at INEX Bird's Eye . I was developing software at ECIX at the time and we got excited and decided to get Alice up and running. A big shout out goes to my collegue, Veit Heller [http://veitheller.de], who finished the Go-implemenetation of the birdwatcher started at said hackathon by Michael Widerkrantz [https://hack.org/mc/]

Alice is Open-Source

We launched Alice shortly after the hackathon on https://lg.ecix.net. Since then, I have continued to enhance performance and ironed out some issues, speeding up the route queries. This year DE-CIX approached me with an offer to sponsor the development of new features for Alice because they want to use it for their customers as well. So we have a beta version up and running with DE-CIX: https://lg-beta.de-cix.net/

We are currently developing a range of exciting new features. Alice was among the first looking glasses supporting human readable BGP Large Communities. It means we can quickly show our customers the reasons why a prefix is filtered or rejected. Now we are adding more generalized BGP communities, making them more human-frindly. Also handling of huge amounts of routes was vastly improved. Next on our list are an even better routes lookup with a more granular search. All of these small developments make life for customers even easier.

Where Next for Alice?

I would love to see more IXPs using Alice. It’s an open source project – everyone can contribute and I’d like to grow a community around it to help focus on areas like deployability, new customer-oriented features; search features like filtering by metro area.
Also support for other BGP-daemons are planned.

At NPD I’d like to find out more about what people expect from a looking glass, and I’m looking forward to participating in the Hackathon.

Alice Adventures

If you are interested in contributing to the development, GitHub is the best platform for opening an issue, https://github.com/alice-lg/alice-lg or you can find Matthias through his GitHub profile https://github.com/mhannig or send him an Email at matthias@hannig.cc

PAM4: an introdution into the new world of 400G transceivers

Transmission speeds of 400G are becoming a reality, with new challenges for optical and electrical components in high speed systems emerging. PAM4 modulation is one key component for 400G transmission with transceivers, this talk will be a show and tell into PAM4. With this knowledge, the design decisions behind the new form factors OSFP, QSFP-DD, SFP56-DD and µQSFP are easier to understand.

This talk will help you to;

design / build new kind of applications or connections with your networking gear in the field, avoid pitfalls when designing your racks, and be aware how power consumption and new plugs will be part of the new world of 400G transceivers.

---

Thomas Weible - Co-Founder and CTO of Flexoptix GmbH. He formerly lead the groundbreaking software development within the company. Thomas has moved more and more towards the field of transceiver technology and his so called „support with no levels and no bullshit“. Enthusiastic in everything he does, he gives realistic and practical answers to get transceivers working and operational. As a regular speaker at several conferences around the globe he is able to target the needs of network engineers.

The Digital Transformation of Higher Education

Johanna de Groot, Strategic Project Manager with SURF and involved in Educational innovation, will talk about new approaches to support digital learning at Neutral Peering Days

Boosting the quality of education and research requires an advanced, reliable and interconnected ICT infrastructure. SURF develops and operates this infrastructure, which consists of both the physical network and a number of collaborative components. I will be giving an overview of the main educational topics we are working on and the opportunities we are uncovering, along with some of the current challenges.

We have three main activity areas:

1. Making use of study data: this involves making use of all the data that are being collected from all sorts of different apps used by students to get more insight into effectiveness of learning for students, teachers and institutions. We support institutions with technical solutions and knowledge exchange to move forward in the way they use study data.

2. Facilitating flexible education: One of our main objectives is to make education more flexible and you can imagine there are lots of technical challenges we have to overcome to achieve this, specifically supporting institutions who want to go in that direction. Next to technical challenges you need cooperation between institutions to move forward. Some of the most exciting flexible education topics come up against obstacles in the form of policy, law and regulations – what you can and can’t do. There are barriers here and it requires an ongoing broader discussion of where we want higher education to go with the Ministry of Education, governing bodies and many others.

3. Improving access to diverse digital learning material: We are also trying to open up new and better educational resources. These consist of digital study materials as prepared by the main publishers, but also an increasing amount of material developed by the teachers themselves. A repository with good metadata is key to making this work.

Navigation

Higher Education is in a transition phase. There are a huge number of technological possibilities and lots of people are experimenting to find new solutions. But transformation takes time and a very high level of cooperation to ensure that students and the overall quality of education improves. The current technological environment is complicated for both students and teachers – what solutions should they use and which ones should they avoid? Our role is to help institutions with navigation of all the alternatives and make their own choices.

Acceleration Agenda

We are about to launch a new cooperative initiative called Acceleration Agenda for innovation in education, to accelerate digital innovation in higher education. This is a four-year program starting in January 2019 which we have developed with the The Netherlands Association of Universities, the Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Sciences and alongside the Ministry of Education. The Acceleration Agenda will work at a national level and focuses both on policy, strategy and technical solutions. All institutions for higher education are involved and invest in the agenda, which makes us confident that it will speed up the digital transformation of higher education in the Netherlands.

More about SURF

SURF is the collaborative ICT organisation for Dutch education and research. SURF offers students, lecturers and scientists in the Netherlands access to the best possible internet and ICT facilities. SURF ensures that students, lecturers and researchers in education and research have access to the best possible ICT resources on favourable terms for the purpose of top-level research and talent development. SURF therefore develops, innovates and operates an advanced, federated e-infrastructure in conjunction with the institutions. SURF also organises demand aggregation, collaboration and knowledge sharing in relation to ICT themes for the member institutions. Creation of added value for its end users is pivotal in the service provided by SURF. https://www.surf.nl/en

Security Issues with IoT

Daan Keuper, Security Specialist at Computest, will give attendees at Neutral Peering Days an insight into what might go wrong as things increasingly talk to other things My focus is on security - assessing application and network risk at the technology level. I do a lot of R&D, comprising research for customers and also on what is beneficial - or dangerous - for society as whole. As we move further into the world of IoT it is important to ensure we are not walking into a world of new security risks.

Hackers on the Road

This year I am working on home automation, i.e. the security risks of the interconnected home, but one area where I have done some detailed research previously is car hacking, which illustrates the broader IoT risks. With built-in Internet connectivity everything inside the car is becoming interconnected – this has many benefits, but the flipside is risk. Criminals could potentially hack into navigational systems. Even cars that are not self-driving – cars that are already on the road - carry risks through their connectedness. Attackers can access everything from air conditioning to the brake pedal to the automatic steering. In tests we conducted recently for some big brand vehicles we found hackers could turn the microphone on or off, eavesdrop on conversations, and track a car in real time. 35% of cars were internet-connected in 2015 and by 2020 that figure will be 100%, so these are significant risks.

The Lifecycle Challenge

The IoT space is interesting because it is relatively new and everything we had learned about security we now have to relearn or reimplement in the IoT space. Many of the same mistakes that were made 20 years ago are currently being made in IoT. For instance, take a connected IP camera or a car. The average IP camera or the average car can be in service for 15 years. It’s nothing like a phone that lasts a year or two and is then replaced. A product with this lifecycle requires a completely new approach, but as many of these products are based on low cost consumer devices - and this creates time to market and pricing pressures – this is not happening. If you just add Internet and think of security later there will be problems. You need to support and evolve your product over 15 years. IoT manufacturers need to offer longer-term security support to mitigate risks. Think of Microsoft Windows; 20 years on and they are still providing 20 new patches every month.

Security Skills Shortage

This challenge is driving a shift in the way we manage the lifecycle of IoT products. When Computest started security testing many years ago, everyone developed software with a very iterative approach, meaning that there was one big release every 6 or 12 months. This approach meant that every release could undergo a formal security test. This has changed as we shifted to agile development and DevOps. Most customers now launch new versions every week or two, and some companies release dozens of versions a week. But how do you handle security in this new environment? Security ceases to be the responsibility of the security team and instead becomes the responsibility of the development or engineering team. The development team then requires a deeper understanding of what constitutes a secure end-product. While we offer training modules and integration modelling in the development process, this is a major challenge, and many companies are struggling with it.

Rising Risks & Botnets

Are the risks growing overall? Well, the stakes are getting higher. More and more criminals are focusing on cyber rather than regular crime because for them the risks are lower, and the potential gains are higher. There has been a sharp increase in criminals using ransomware, and the criminals are getting smarter with more focus on specific sectors. The quality of malware improves, and the ransom price goes up accordingly. If you can encrypt all the patient files for a hospital you can set a serious ransom. One new trend we are seeing is criminals threatening companies with reputational damage using botnets made of Twitter or Facebook users and demanding sizable ransoms. In the Neutral Peering Days two years ago, the Hackathon covered the largest DDoS attack worldwide, executed by IoT devices around the world – hacking IP cameras to create a gigantic botnet. I will be interested to see what new threat we come up with this year!

---

More about Computest

Computest focuses on software quality – testing the security, performance, and functionality of apps and sites. Besides IoT they work for banks, governments, publishers, the medical industry -pretty much every sector you can think of. Their aim is to make sure that online applications and websites work quickly, reliably and securely. https://www.computest.nl/en

Biography:

Eric Loos joined BICS in 2007, holding positions as architect of the Carrier Ethernet Service Network and manager of the expert team in the operations department before taking up a role as Senior Product Manager Capacity & IP at the end of 2011. He has over 15 years of experience in the Service Provider segment, alternating between network engineering, architecture design and operational roles. Familiar with all stages of a service lifecycle, he has a unique perspective on the challenges faced by service providers and carriers.