Increasing Connectivity through the Development of Local Networks

Written for the Office of the Secretary-General of the International Telecommunications Union in reference to Administrative Region E

Keertan Kini, WeiHua Li, Daniela Miao, Lauren Stephens

{krkini16, wli17, dmiao, lhs} @mit.edu

1 Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude towards Danny Weitzner, Peter Lord, Hal Abelson, and Alan Davidson for their valuable guidance, mentorship and feedback on this paper. This work could have not been completed without their arduous support.

This paper also benefits significantly from the expertise of Jessie Stickgold-Sarah, Michael Trice and Anna Wexler. Their advice on general argument formation was crucial to the success of this work.

2 Table of Contents

Executive Summary 1. Historical Background 1.1 Scale and Inefficient Problems 1.2 Inefficient Routing Phenomenon 1.3 Background on Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) 1.4 IXPs Current State 2. Problem 2.1 Internet Connectivity 2.2 Past Cable Faults Case Studies 2.3 Cost of Latency and Loss of Connectivity 2.4 IXPs as More Secure Alternative for Local Traffic Exchange 3. Policy Recommendations 3.1 Relevance to ITU 3.2 Benefits of IXPs 3.3 Past Policies Regarding IXPs 3.4 Specific Policy Recommendations: India and Bangladesh 4. Support for Policy Recommendations 4.1 Case study: Kenya 4.2 Case study: 4.3 Case Study: Brazil 5. Analysis of Policy Recommendations 5.1 Avoiding Balkanization of the Internet 5.2 Political Challenges for Implementation 5.3 Scalability of Local Replication 5.4 Effectiveness of the Local Replication 5.5 Privacy Issues 6. Conclusion Appendix I: Glossary Appendix II: Data on Submarine Cable Vulnerabilities Appendix III: Past Attempts to Mitigate Submarine Cable Vulnerabilities Appendix IV: Latency and Internet Quality Appendix V: Data on IXPs and Local Data Centers Bibliography

3 Executive Summary

This document analyzes the resiliency and connectivity of the Internet in Administrative Region E (Asia and Australasia) of the Internet Telecommunications Union (ITU). We consider how to reduce the widespread outages caused by cable faults in natural disasters such as the 2006 earthquake and the 2011 typhoon. To improve the resiliency for the network, we advocate adding Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) to mitigate existing issues with submarine cables, encourage colocation of data centers, reduce latency, and decrease costs, among other benefits. In particular, we identify two countries - India and Bangladesh - where investment in IXPs and policies to encourage competition among regional ISPs can have a huge impact on the connectivity and resiliency of the network in addition to the economic and efficiency benefits IXPs confer.

The first half of the paper presents a security and vulnerability based motivation for IXPs - namely the outages surrounding submarine cable failures and analyzes the local and large-scale benefits of increased numbers of IXPs and data centers. Initially, we examine the growth and development of the Internet and issues with inefficient routing. We show these vulnerabilities necessitate the building of more robust local networks within countries by utilizing IXPs. Then, we demonstrate that the construction of IXPs can alleviate resiliency concerns surrounding the submarine cable network.

The second half of the paper reviews the economic and efficiency benefits of IXPs and presents policies that will encourage investment and development of IXPs. To illustrate these policies, we identify two major types of countries that can benefit from policies to encourage the growth of IXPs. The first are fast growing nations that have both the capital and market for telecom investment, but whose infrastructure is not yet completed or unified - for example India and China. The second category are nations that have less capital and little infrastructure - for example Bangladesh. We then use the case studies of India and Bangladesh to provide the following recommendations:

India: Link the existing government infrastructure by IXPs-equivalents to the smaller, private ISPs in order to create a robust backbone for domestic Internet traffic and networks.

Bangladesh: Limit the control of the existing for-profit monopoly to the only submarine cable by adding a public IXP to the new submarine cable expected to be finished in 2014 in order to provide reliable competitive access to the international Internet framework and encourage further domestic competition.

Following the policy recommendations, we analyze case studies illustrating the success of IXP implementation in Kenya, Singapore and Brazil. Subsequently, we present detailed analyses of our recommendations to study feasibility and highlight implementation challenges. We use this analysis to show that the ITU should promote the development of IXPs in Administrative Region E beginning with the countries of India and Bangladesh.

4 1. Historical Background

1.1 Scale and Inefficient Routing Problems

The Internet currently functions as a medium for spreading ideas and information. It has unparalleled depth and breadth as a tool for spreading pluralism and encouraging the marketplace of ideas. As the amount of data trafficked through the Internet has grown exponentially over the last decade and shows no sign of slowing down, the need for a robust and efficient network system has grown increasingly important. Unfortunately, the design of Internet infrastructure not evolved nearly as quickly. Due to the fact that physical facilities are governed by a number of different stakeholders, ranging from commercial corporations to government agencies, collaboration efforts to improve the existing international network infrastructure have been less than successful. This leads outdated facilities and inefficient traffic routes. As more and more bottlenecks occur on the network, data transfers experience larger delays, which ultimately hinders the dissemination of information over the Internet, and undermines the fundamental principle upon which the Internet was built. In this section, we first describe an inefficient routing phenomenon caused by outdated infrastructures, and explore methods to mitigate the issue.

1.2 Inefficient Routing Phenomenon

Early on in the evolution of the Internet, there was a general lack of domestic network infrastructure in most countries. Since a majority of the network traffic is international, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) did not see a need to invest in construction of local connectivity. This scarcity of physical infrastructure imposed significant costs on domestic connections between ISPs, in particular where domestic connectivity is not very competitive (and therefore expensive). As most ISPs purchase international transit in order to provide global connectivity anyway, some find it convenient to include domestic traffic in these links, particularly in countries where access to domestic infrastructure is limited and prices are high. As a result, domestic traffic, such as an between neighbors, may leave the country in order to be exchanged - a process sometimes known as tromboning. This process is detailed in the figure below, in which each of the ISPs in Country A uses international transit to exchange traffic with one another, as well as to exchange traffic with foreign ISPs and content providers. However, there are performance and cost issues with this method, as more and more local traffic has to be transmitted across countries before coming back to the same region.

5 Figure 6: Illustration of Tromboning, where Domestic Traffic Uses International Transit Lines

While tromboning does not pose a problem when there is little domestic traffic, it is beginning to cause great inefficiencies in networks today. As the Internet market penetration grows and more homes are equipped with broadband connections, there has been a clear incline in the amount of domestic data transfers. Evidently, it would be significantly efficient if local communication such as between neighbor can be exchanged locally without leaving the country, unlike the illustration in Figure 6. Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) can be introduced to serve this purpose.

1.3 Background on Internet eXchange Points (IXPs)

In the real world, IXPs are simply physical points that can be a switch in a basement, or a large network spanning multiple data centers, with elaborate power backup and cooling systems. These points facilitate local information exchange between different ISPs’ networks. Figure 7 below provides a simple illustration of this new setup.

6 Figure 7: Illustration of Local Data Exchange using IXPs

As the figure above demonstrates, IXPs provide a point of local exchange that circumvents the process of tromboning - an email between neighbors can be simply transferred over two different ISP networks via an IXP. Not only does this data transfer take less time than internationally routing the traffic, it also reduces the traffic burden on international transit lines. In addition, there are extra performance and economic benefits associated with IXPs that will be explored in detail later in our policy recommendation section.

Finally, we highlight the issue of IXP governance - how IXPs are typically implemented and administered. It is important to note that IXPs do not have significant impacts on existing network infrastructure, as they do not increase the burden domestically. Given that the traffic was already present in the first place - IXPs simply reroute the data. However, regional IXP interconnection has proven to cause complex policy problems in the past. As the World Telecommunication Policy Forum suggested in May 2013, there is no ideal model for administering IXPs since market, cultural and legal conditions vary widely across geographies1 . Most often, IXPs begin by collaborative agreement between ISPs, but subsequent success depends on the goodwill and abilities of ISPs to cooperate in their use of shared infrastructure. In addition to ISP collaboration, there are several other institutional models that have been adopted to operate IXPs:

1. A non-profit industry association of ISPs 2. An operator neutral for-profit company 3. A university or government agency

Of the above models, the most common is a non-profit industry association of ISPs, which can be seen in Europe where members of a not-for-profit organization collectively “own” the facility.

1 “Internet Exchange Points” 7 Operating and administrative costs can be shared, and adjustments are made according to the ISP’s capacity to the IXP connection. In the U.S., for-profit IXPs are more popular, operated by third-party specialist companies such as or CIX. These types of commercial companies are often provider neutral and do not compete with ISPs in providing Internet services to end-users.

Despite of existing literature on IXP operations, a variety of factors will need to be taken into account when establishing the institutional arrangements for a new IXP. There could various issues given a local IXP is sometimes seen as a thread by commercial providers or centralized government agencies. There may be resistance to a particular model of IXP administration and participation could be hindered as a result. Overall, IXP governance has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, taking into account various economic, financial and political considerations. We discuss more details of potential complications in Section 5 of this paper.

1.4 IXPs Current State

There are currently more than 350 IXPs operational worldwide, with U.S. leading at about 86 around the country2 . In general, developed countries are much farther ahead in terms of IXP adoption, with most of them located in Western Europe, North America and Oceania. Parts of Asia and South America also contain some of the largest IXPs, including Japan, Hong Kong and Brazil. Among developing countries, there are regions that are noticeably lacking in network infrastructure such as most of Africa and South & SouthEast Asia in areas surrounding India.

Due to the limited amount of local Internet service in many developing regions, most user-generated traffic is international, resulting in large capital outflows to foreign ISPs. In addition, even local ISPs in these regions tend to operate their services offshore, where it is often cheaper due to the lack of low-cost local infrastructure. Thus, establishing more IXPs not only helps to encourage more local content development, but also creates incentives for local hosting of Internet services due to the larger pool of local users who will be able to access online content faster. For these reasons, we make several policy recommendations that are geared towards increasing the presence of IXPs in ITU Administrative Region E. Specifically, we wish to enhance competitive opportunities, improve quality of Internet services, and ensure such services are more equitably accessible to all local users.

Through some general background research, we have discovered that barriers to establishing IXPs in developing countries are not usually technical, but instead are due to a lack of appreciation for the mutual benefit among ISPs, as well as resistance from existing ISPs that hold market dominance. As a result, in this paper, we aim to provide an analysis of the importance of IXPs, and focus on two particular countries where our policy recommendations can become immediately actionable: India and Bangladesh. Details of the analysis and policy recommendations will be presented later in Section 4. Before that, however, we would like to motivate the problem by identifying flaws in the major infrastructure that ISPs currently rely heavily on - submarine cables.

2 Jensen, Mike 8 2. Problem

While there are numerous efficiency benefits to IXPs - as mentioned in the previous section and outlined by independent consultant Mike Jensen in his report to the , many ISPs and nations have not been interested in promoting IXP development3. This is mainly due to the fact that most ISPs still rely heavily on submarine cable systems for Internet connectivity. In the early adoption days of the Internet, submarine cables emerged as a relatively straightforward and inexpensive method to transport network data. Today, even though benefits of IXPs have been widely acknowledged, most online service providers still lack the incentive to abandon their established ways of network operations. Without a clearly defined motivation, our policy recommendations promoting widespread adoption of IXPs will likely be ill-received.

In this section, we motivate the issue by presenting IXPs as a way to mitigate existing network vulnerabilities and increase resiliency, in addition to the efficiency-based arguments that have been made. In order to do this, we examine a particular vulnerability of the current Internet connectivity realm - submarine cable faults. As mentioned before, submarine cables are essential to both the global and local routing of the Internet, but while the submarine cable network is indispensable, it also proves particularly susceptible to accidents and attacks alike. Faults in the network have created widespread outages and latencies. The outages become even more significant when the ability of ISPs to route around these outages and use different cables is often delayed or nonexistent due to the lack of local routing abilities - something IXPs can help mitigate.

2.1 Internet Connectivity

Despite the growing trend towards decentralization, the current Internet network heavily relies on a handful of international transfer points through submarine cables. More than 95% of intercontinental traffic flows through submarine cables4. Even more surprising, intra-national and even intra-city traffic often flows through these cables, causing tromboning. The cost of this detour can be seen in the case of Africa where over $600 million dollars are paid to other nations to route inter-African traffic: a cost incurred due to lack of local connectivity5 . In contrast the TEAMs cable - the main cable for most of sub-Saharan Africa cost around $130 million.

In order to solve the issue of local connectivity, Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) can be used. In particular, local IXPs enable different local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to connect with each other, bypassing thousands of miles of submarine cables. Although local IXPs are not sufficient to prevent tromboning completely, a lack of local IXPs can make tromboning - and therefore a greater reliance on submarine cables - necessary.

The problems of relying on the submarine cables can be seen in examining the effects of submarine cable faults on the connectivity of the Internet. Below, we present a few examples of major cable faults with widespread outages and then analyze a few of these faults to

3 Jensen, Mike 4 Carter 5 “Internet Society - African Union(AU)...” 9 demonstrate the widespread outages that can result from a lack of local connectivity and why IXPs are needed to mitigate the problems caused by cable faults.

2006 December - An earthquake off the coast of Taiwan disrupted multiple cables and the top two Chinese ISPs at that time China Telecom and China Unicom, reported outages of over 90% when connecting to the US or Europe4.

2007 June - An incident involving Vietnamese pirates cutting a submarine cable in an attempt to get copper and the cost to repair cable was over $5 million and took over a month11.

2008 December - Cables faults in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf caused widespread outages in Middle East and North Africa (65% outages), the Persian Gulf (45% outages), and India (32% outages).

2009 October - A typhoon off the coast of Taiwan disrupted multiple cables and caused widespread outages in South Asia.

2011 April - A earthquake hit Japan damaging several submarine cables in the area.

April - A Georgian woman cut off 90% of Armenian Internet for 5 hours when her spade cut through a fiber optic cable.

2012 February - The TEAMS cable in Africa was cut twice - once in February and once in April.

March - The SEA-ME-WE 4 cable was cut creating a major disruption in Bangladesh's Internet.8

2.2 Past Cable Faults Case Studies

2006 Cable Fault in Taiwan

In 2006, large earthquakes hit the Luzon Strait - a bottleneck for many of the submarine cables connecting to East Asia. Of the nine cables in the region, seven were damaged. One measurement of the damage is the effect on network prefixes - ranges of contiguous IP addresses. Over 60% of the prefixes in India, China/Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines either experienced outages or unstable - unstable prefixes can only sporadically be accessed. These outages could not be completely repaired until 51 days later. The outages and

10 unstableness of prefixes across the region have been visualized in the graphs below6. Not only was this a dramatic loss of connectivity, but the problem of rerouting traffic caused even more complications. Some rerouting of note is: Telecom (AS5511) provided temporary transit to Bharti, Indonesian routes move to INDOSAT, China Netcom and China Telecom use Sprint temporarily. This rerouting took a significant amount of time and happened through negotiation between providers rather than automatically. As one major provider revealed, it had to “query other networks to recover both connectivity to important destinations … and also capacity to avoid congestion” indicating that there was no automatic rerouting of paths for a break of this scale7. This lack of automatic rerouting capabilities caused this provider delay of nine days to recover 80% of previous traffic capacity.

Figures 1 and 2: Unstables and outages of prefixes from 2006 Taiwan earthquake8.

This same widespread outage was repeated in 2009 when Typhoon Morakot hit Taiwan and, a few weeks later, an earthquake struck compounding the damage. Once again, networks across Asia were unable to connect to American and European networks. Both times however, one nation - Japan suffered relatively little damage.

2011 Earthquake in Japan

6 Zmijewski, Earl 7 Chen, Kai 8 Zmijewski, Earl 11 The 2011 quake that occurred off the coast of Japan hit several major cables, however it had little impact on the overall connectivity of Japanese networks. As Renesys stated in their analysis, Japan’s Internet has “ a dense web of domestic and international connectivity that is among the richest and most diverse on earth”9. Japan has numerous Internet Exchange Points that connect local networks allowing ISPs to utilize all possible alternative routes. In particular, despite the 2011 earthquake hitting Japan the hardest, Japan suffered fewer prefix outages than other countries such as China, Hong Kong, and the Philippines10.

Cable faults in Bangladesh

Bangladesh provides an interesting case study for the importance of connecting local ISPs to each other. It is only connected to one submarine cable and just recently installed a single alternative land route to India. Before the overland connection with India, cable faults on the Sea-Me-We 4 (SMW4) cable would cause all of Bangladesh to lose connectivity with the rest of the world. However, when the Sea-Me-We 4 cable went down for maintenance in 2012, this was the first time a provider in Bangladesh maintained connectivity without the cable or satellite - going through the new land route with India. However, looking at the connectivity of all networks, it is clear only one network, Fiber@Home was able to maintain full connectivity without significant increases in latency.11 In addition note that several networks lost connectivity completely. Notably, despite alternative routes, many ISPs were unable to use these routes as they were not directly connected and could not transfer data to other ISPs. Even when alternative routes are available, it is clear a submarine cable fault can still have an impact on connectivity and latency if ISPs are not able to exchange data locally and many ISPs cannot connect to these alternative routes.

Figures 3 and 4: Latency and responding networks for Bangladesh ISPs.

These case studies are just a few examples of the effects of submarine cable cuts in recent years. Roughly 100 cable cuts occur each year.12 Some of these cuts are due to earthquakes, currents, hurricanes, and volcanic activity. Yet the cables are susceptible to more

9 “Japan Quake” 10 “Japan Quake” 11 Madory, Doug 12 Chang, Alexander 12 than just natural disasters: fishing, piracy, ship anchors, and other human activities account for more than 60% of submarine cable cuts. In highly connected countries such as the US or the UK with many cables and IXPs, cable cuts have a much less noticeable effect. However in bottlenecked areas such as the Red Sea or the Luzon Strait as well as areas with few IXPs and a lack of alternative bandwidth, cable cuts can have a much more drastic effect both on connectivity and latency. As India and much of Southeast Asia are situated between two major bottlenecks - the Red Sea and the Luzon Strait - they are particularly sensitive to many of these cuts as is evidenced by the many outages and increased latency.

2.3 Cost of Latency and Loss of Connectivity

The full costs of the outages and latency associated with submarine cable faults are difficult to ascertain. The cost to repair cables alone can be immense - in a 2007 incident involving Vietnamese pirates cutting a submarine cable in an attempt to get copper, the cost to repair cable was over $5 million and took over a month.13 However, it is more difficult to ascertain the indirect economic costs of loss of Internet connectivity and increased latency. Analysts suggest these effects can “entail huge economic cost.”14 Estimates for the indirect economic cost of the December 2008 outage near the Red Sea was roughly $64 million dollars. 15 The 2006 earthquake that severed the Luzon Strait cables, "catastrophically affected financial transactions, particularly in the foreign exchange market."16 Following the 2006 earthquake a survey in China revealed 97% of Chinese Internet users had problems visiting foreign websites and 57% felt that their life and work was affected.17

While connectivity and bandwidth are important, low latency is also important. The classic example is high frequency trading. A broker could lose up to $20 million in revenues if their electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition.18 However, latency matters for other businesses too. For Amazon, every 100ms of latency costs the company 1% in sales. For Google, an extra half second in loading time dropped traffic by 20%.19

Perhaps the best model for calculating indirect costs is the model presented by Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. They estimate both direct and indirect costs of cable faults. For example, the modelling indicates that if Australia were to lose 100% of its connection, it would cost roughly $152 million each day until the cables were repaired, which can take anywhere from a few days to a few months.20 For a similar case in South Korea, the total indirect economic costs until repair could be over $1 billion.21

These costs can be mitigated by reducing the loss of connectivity and latency that occurs as a result of submarine cable faults. While IXPs cannot completely mitigate the

13 “Cable Theft Costs Vietnam ...” 14 Chan, Edmond 15 Gady, Franz-Stefan 16 Gady, Franz-Stefan 17 “Economic Impact of Submarine Cable Disruptions” 18 “Latency Is Everywhere And It Costs You Sales” 19 Linden, Greg 20 “Economic Impact of Submarine Cable Disruptions” 21 “Economic Impact of Submarine Cable Disruptions” 13 problems caused by submarine cable faults, they can provide rerouting options which increase the connectivity of the network, reduce latency, and provide local traffic routing in the event of multiple cable faults that prevent international routing of traffic.

2.4 IXPs as More Secure Alternative for Local Traffic Exchange

Few of the cable cuts described above were the result of a coordinated attack. Many were caused by natural disasters, shipping anchors, and trawlers. However, an even more chilling vulnerability is that submarine cables are susceptible to a coordinated attack which could leave regions or entire countries without global Internet connectivity or at least severely reduced bandwidth.

While there has not yet been a proven coordinated attack on the submarine cable network, there have been multiple accidental failures, both as a result of the environment and human disruption. In addition, most countries have fewer than 7 submarine cable nodes connecting them to the global Internet graph making them vulnerable to both attacks by small coordinated groups and attacks as part of a larger war. Such attacks were carried out against telegraph cables in World War I and were suspected to be carried out against submarine cables in the Cold War.22

Finally submarine cables are also vulnerable to wiretapping, such as the recent allegations of NSA tapping. The high density of traffic that currently flows through submarine cables allows easier information collection by intelligence agencies. For a further analysis of the vulnerabilities of submarine cables, see Appendix II.

In contrast to submarine cables which stretch thousands of miles internationally under the oceans, IXPs are often located in a bounded area, concentrated at an easily defended point within the borders of a nation. This means that IXPs can offer a level of defensibility that submarine cables cannot afford to offer - both for physical security and to prevent wiretapping by outside governments. For a further discussion of wiretapping, see Appendix II. In addition, since most ISPs pay a fixed fee to access each IXP, they also have a vested interest in ensuring the security of the IXP. Overall, this implies that IXPs will generally be easier to protect from attacks.

2.4. Need for IXPs to mitigate effects of cable faults

Addressing submarine cable network vulnerabilities directly requires great expense - submarine cables are costly to build - as well as international cooperation. It requires that all countries that a cable passes through to agree on and enforce policies. In addition, such policies do not completely mitigate the risk of cable cuts - particularly those caused by large-scale natural disasters. Policy makers from around the world have attempted to reduce the vulnerability of submarine cables directly. While substantial improvements have been made, due to their length, private ownership, international nature, location in major shipping lanes, and exposure to environmental hazards, submarine cables have proven difficult to protect. For a further discussion on past policies for protecting submarine cable see Appendix III. We propose encouraging IXPs as a solution to the loss of connectivity and increased latency caused by

22 Winkler, Jonathan 14 submarine cable faults. While IXPs cannot prevent cable faults from occurring, they can mitigate the problems caused by rerouting traffic around the cable faults.

15 3. Policy Recommendations

Following are our direct policy recommendations to the ITU in reference to the expansion of IXP development in South and Southeast Asia. Specifically, we will address why and how the ITU should act, detail the benefits of IXPs, discuss past implementations of IXPs on a large scale, and explain how those benefits can gained in two specific nations: India and Bangladesh. We address some of the particular challenges for implementation in both nations, and then support our recommendations by providing case studies in which IXPs have delivered on the benefits we have described.

3.1 Relevance to ITU

Below, we describe two cases: those of India and Bangladesh as specific cases upon which the benefits of widespread IXP development can be readily implemented in Administrative Region E and the benefits felt thereof. Yet we address the ITU because while its direct recommendations are nonbinding, it already has recognized the benefits of IXP development and possesses both the reach and resources to impact the region for the better.

In the World Policy/ICT Policy Forum 2013 draft opinion entitled Promoting IXPs As a Long Term Solution to Advance Connectivity, Member States and Sector Members are encouraged to develop policies to encourage IXP development and advises guidelines to do so. Included in these Members States and Sector Members not only include the nations of Bangladesh and India, but also several of the largest ISPs in both nations including both National ISPs in India - Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd.23

Both nations have precedence in investing into national telecommunications infrastructure, and allowing ISPs to expand via IXP access would provide access to the huge populations of both nations - these points are addressed in detail below. Attracting private investment would not be a significant burden to open up entire markets of consumers to across South and Southeast Asia. We note the funding aspect because, not only can the ITU leverage its partnerships but also initiate this project under the ICT Development Fund for seed funding because many nations in South and Southeast Asia are less developed nations. While our area of interest may not fulfill all the ideal specifications, IXP development in these areas does provide for, “facilitation of multi-national cooperation”, “potential to become self-sufficient in the short to medium term”, and “potential of projects to attract funding from external sources”, among other criteria.24

Lastly, in terms of governance of these future IXPs, India already possesses a non-profit organization which acts as the neutral arbiter and handles maintenance of the existing India’s existing IXP-equivalents. In Bangladesh the situation is more complicated due to the presence of a government-regulated monopoly. The ITU, in its opinion, notes that “effective IXPs often emerge where Member States have adopted multi-stakeholder policy processes” and that “that liberalization of the electronic communications market may play a significant role in allowing a

23 “ITU Regional Office for Asia & Pacific Region” 24 “ICT Development Fund” 16 competitive market to emerge to support introduction and interconnection with IXPs”.25 By acting, the ITU can help shape that competitive market, and ensure that growth and development will result from a more democratized system of control over IXPs.

3.2 Benefits of IXPs

We present the vulnerabilities of submarine cables, as a motivating factor behind promoting local connectivity in the Internet through IXPs. However, there are also economic and performance arguments for using IXPs. These arguments have been explored in papers such as the Internet Society report on “Promoting the use of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)” and we review them here. 26

Latency and Performance

An IXP helps to keep local Internet traffic local. For instance, traffic originating from East Coast of the should not need to use international submarine cables to reach a destination in the same region. IXPs were introduced so that all parties willing to participate could connect at one local point, exchange traffic. Lowering latency is accompanied by many secondary benefits including increasing the efficiency of network overall, more details on benefits of decreased latency can be found in Appendix IV. In addition, routing local data traffic through locally constructed IXPs is often cheaper than using submarine cables nowadays. This is especially true as the amount of international traffic multiplies, and the burden on submarine cables grows.27

Apart from Round Trip Time (RTT) reductions, using an IXP can also result in better network performance and Quality of Service(QoS), since the longer data packets have to travel, the higher the chance they will be lost or corrupted.28 In addition, international lines and submarine cables are still available for data transmission usage in case an IXP fails.

Economic Advantages

IXPs have a direct economic impact by cutting the cost of routing Internet traffic. For many countries without an IXP most traffic is routed through submarine cables. For example, only 17 of the 53 nations had local IXPs in 2007 and therefore exchanges most traffic overseas.29 This results in Africa paying over $600 million to other nations every year for inter-African traffic due to tromboning.30 IXPs would reduce or eliminate this cost. Looking at the chart below for Kenyan bandwidth costs, it is clear that local routing is significantly less expensive - up to 9 times cheaper.31 Table 1: Local versus international bandwidth comparisons

25 ITU-SG WTPF13IEG3 26 Jensen, Mike 27 Waugh, Rob 28 Cisco Systems, “Internet Exchange Point Design ...” 29 Jensen, Mike 30 “Internet Society, African Union” 31 “Via Africa Creating Local and Regional IXPs” 17 Bandwidth International Local

64K $1687 $190

256K $3375 $378

1MB $6750 $757

Source: Telkom Kenya Bandwidth Tariffs December 2001.

It is harder to estimate the indirect economic benefits of having faster access speeds because local services such as video, telecommuting, and e-commerce become possible, however this benefit can be significant. Studies show that each additional $5 billion investment in broadband creates 250,000 jobs and another 150,000 in "network effects" spurring new online applications and services.32 With every percentage point increase in broadband penetration, employment expands by nearly 300,000 jobs, and jobs involved in building of these networks pay on average 42 percent more than the average manufacturing job.33 In the global economy, access to broadband has become essential to community economic prosperity as it connects rural areas to urban regions. Investments in construction of IXPs can benefit the local economy and encourage healthy market competition.

IXPs are cheap when compared to the savings they offer. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the typical set-up cost for the technology of an IXP can be as low as $6,500 and are often below $40,000 in addition to the building and land the IXP is housed in.34 While there are additional small ongoing costs to maintain the IXP, the raw hardware and set-up cost is low. In addition, the ongoing costs can be covered by charging individual ISPs. This low cost and large benefit makes IXPs economically viable and attractive.

Resiliency and Reliability

Having already mentioned the vulnerabilities of submarine cables, we argue that constructing more IXPs improves both the resiliency and reliability of local network systems. When transoceanic cables are damaged, or disrupted unexpectedly, IXPs provide re-routing possibilities for traffic that is intended for local destinations. For instance, network transmissions between coastal regions tend to rely on submarine cables due to their proximity to the sea. When such cables are unstable, both latency and performance can suffer significantly. With an abundance of IXPs on the continent, traffic may be re-directed to make use of inland ISP routes , and therefore minimize performance impacts. Furthermore, as the number of IXPs increases, the total number of possible paths grows rapidly, which in turn drives up the reliability of the overall network. Note that in cases such as Bangladesh, even though there are some alternative land routes, because ISPs are unable to exchange traffic freely, many ISPs still lose connectivity when there is a fault in the submarine cable. By adding IXPs, all ISPs can take advantage of alternative routes and rerouting due to cable failures will be easier.

32 “High Speed Internet” 33 “Economic Growth & Quality Jobs” 34 “Via Africa Creating Local and Regional IXPs..” 18 In many disaster management situations, maintaining basic Internet services is essential - as demonstrated by the recent Haiyan Typhoon event in the Philippines. Many victims in affected regions relied on basic Internet services such as emailing and to reach out for help and publicize food or shelter needs. Expanding affordable Internet services will let more people reach the help they require, and assist relief workers in providing high-quality emergency services. IXPs provide exactly this layer of guarantee when international traffic becomes unavailable. When more sophisticated network services involving international exchanges are down, IXPs allow local data transfer that supports basic telecommunication.

Creates Demand for Local Data Centers

After analyzing various benefits of IXPs themselves, we now examine the positive externalities IXPs can generate for a country or region via local data centers. Here we use local data centers as a generic term to describe all physical hubs that store web content in order to provide access to them in the future. We do not use local data centers to refer to any specific technical implementations such as mirror servers or replicated databases.

Most IXPs are co-located with local data centers to capitalize on the benefits of having local data cached. In Appendix V, we provide a detailed analysis of the correlation relationship between IXPs and local data centers, and show that there is evidence for a positive correlation between IXPs and data centers across nations. In addition, the examination of particular case studies in Kenya, Singapore, and Brazil in Section 5 suggests that building IXPs does encourage colocation of data centers. Hence, by constructing more IXPs, countries are likely to benefit indirectly from the construction of more local data centers as well.

3.3 Past Policies Regarding IXPs

With the increasing demand for faster bandwidth and lower latency, the composition of Internet traffic is changing rapidly. Governments worldwide recognize the need to optimize the Internet connectivity. Several governments have already adopted internal policies promoting IXPs. For example, the Singaporean and Malaysian governments, for example, have sought to encourage the establishment of IXPs.

The Info-communications Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) proposed to establish the Singapore Internet Exchange (SGIX) - an IXP organization - as a hub for Internet traffic in 2009. The government hoped the SGIX would seek to promote efficient interconnectivity for the Internet and improved connectivity to Singapore. SGIX now has two operational Internet Exchange Points located at data centers in Global Switch and 1-Net Singapore. In September of this year, the aggregated peak traffic on SGIX networks has exceeded 10Gbps for the first time, a key milestone since its establishment two years ago. SGIX has played a critical role in connecting the Asian hub to the world. The benefits of this IXP were compounded by Singapore’s very dense population and small geographical space.

MyIX, a neutral Malaysia Internet Exchange - a group of Internet Exchange Points - was announced by the Malaysian government in the early 2006 and was completed by the end of same year. MyIX was set up through cooperation of ISPs. It keeps the Malaysian Internet traffic local by allowing direct connectivity among local ISPs, instead of rerouting the regional traffic 19 through other countries. Many Malaysian people have agreed that MyIX delivers significant benefits, such as preventing tromboning effect, cost saving, better quality of broadband service, excellent value proposition, and knowledgeable platform.35

In addition to local governments’ effort, non-profit organizations around the world have encouraged IXPs. The Internet Society (ISOC) involves in a wide spectrum of Internet issues. In particular it establishes and promotes Internet principles that are intended to persuade local governments to make decisions, for example, the development of the Internet exchange points in Africa. The Mombasa IXP is the second exchange point after the first Kenyan exchange point that was launched in Nairobi in 2001. Its establishment was facilitated in part by the Internet Society’s African Interconnection. The Mombasa IXP is a big initiative to promote more robust Internet connections to Africa. “The Internet Society is committed to the establishment of IXPs in Africa as they provide immediate and significant benefits to Internet users and the local Internet industry,” said Michuki Mwangi, the Regional Development Manager for Africa at the Mombasa IXP launching event.

The European Internet Exchange Association (Euro-IX) is another exemplar association for promoting presence of European IXPs. It has more than 40 member IXPs and over 3,600 connected customers to these member IXPs in the European IP community. The association gathers information on regulatory issues affecting member exchanges within the region and other jurisdictions that could potentially impact on the members. On 17th July 2013, Euro-IX has partnered with The Internet Society. This new partnership has been received with great enthusiasm from both parties and they all recognize their shared interests.

All these previous policies, whether by governments, non-profit organizations, or by international collaboration demonstrate the importance of IXP development to the building of robust local networks. Yet as of 2007, 88 countries still had no IXP. In addition, the Asia Pacific region saw the slowest growth in IXPs in 2007. However, these same policies are not as easily implemented in developing nations with a few major ISPs that are able to dominate most of the market. As the Internet Society stated in its report on promoting IXPs “The barriers to establishing IXPs … are largely non-financial: there is often a lack of mutual appreciation of benefits ... as well as resistance from those providers with market dominance.”36 Therefore we present IXPs as a solution to a larger network vulnerability and suggest the ITU act as a neutral multinational organization and overcome the resistance of monopoly holders.

3.4 Specific Policy Recommendations: India and Bangladesh

Asia and Australasia (Administrative Region E) is a vast region. Not only does it include nations such as Israel, Iran, and Pakistan, but also Japan and Australia, spanning all of South and Southeast Asia. We cannot address all the special cases, but we decided to focus on a specific subset whose situations are all similar. For case studies, we selected two countries with varying levels of competition - one to represent larger countries with more infrastructure, and one to represent smaller nations with less infrastructure. Connected primarily by cables

35 “About MyIX” 36 Jensen, Mike 20 running through the Straits of Luzon and the Red Sea, India and Bangladesh highlight the problems of many of the bottleneck-affected nations in Southeast Asia. Due to the density of the cables in the bottlenecks, faults often occur in multiple cables simultaneously and the lack of overland cables due to geopolitical tensions compound the impact of cable faults. Additionally, we mention nations - Kenya, Singapore, and Brazil - all of which possess strong infrastructures, numerous cable connections, and robust local networks. These nations are in little danger of loss of Internet connectivity or huge latency and therefore exemplify the benefits of IXP development.

Policy Summary:

India: Link the existing government infrastructure by IXPs-equivalents to the smaller, private ISPs in order to create a robust backbone for domestic Internet traffic and networks.

Bangladesh: Limit the control of the existing for-profit monopoly to the only submarine cable by adding a public IXP to the new submarine cable expected to be finished in 2014 in order to provide reliable competitive access to the international Internet framework and encourage further domestic competition.

Policy Recommendation: India

Challenges:

India is politically stable and possesses a booming economy, including a rapidly expanding technological sector. The building of IXPs would be an investment which could feed into it’s current telecom industry as well as enable further development in other areas such as the Indian entertainment industry.

India is located at a precarious position in the world’s Internet network. It is situated between two major bottlenecks - the Red Sea and the Straits of Luzon. India has been affected by most major cable faults in each of these areas as overland international routes are severely limited. Due to instability or geopolitical tensions in its region - Afghanistan, China, Pakistan - India has very few alternative land routes to the rest of Asia and Europe. As such, India is particularly vulnerable to the effects of submarine cable faults.

The lack of local infrastructure outside large cities contribute to the fact that only about 3% of India’s 1.2 billion people have home Internet access. According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, additional reasons include restrictions on foreign investment and the fact that investment in telecom infrastructure is at approximately 1% of GDP as opposed to an average of approximately 2.5% in other developing nations.37

These are not the only challenges which India faces. India has only about seven IXP-equivalents in the entire country, and each one is located within a major city.38 In India, rather than IXPs, they have National Internet eXchange of India points, run by a non-profit foundation

37 Fernholz, Tim 38 “List of Asian / Pasific IXPs” 21 with the same name.39 In addition, the 10 years since the NIXI non-profit, the number of IXP-equivalents increased by less than one per year. This existing framework for governance of IXPs is promising, however it is evident that the NIXI non-profit has not had nearly as much impact as Brazil’s policies have had within the same time span. To complicate the issue, India has a number of private ISPs, each which are mostly for very regional services as well as two national ISPs which cover the vast majority of the continent.40 In addition, except for the national ISPs, regional services often boast monopolies over their specific areas of interest.

Solutions:

India boasts a history of government involvement in building telecommunications infrastructure, as demonstrated by its still state-owned ISPs. Therefore, the ITU can work with the government by reducing the barriers to foreign and private investors, funneling ITU efforts through the NIXI as an established organization for the monitoring and maintenance of the existing IXP-equivalents. These IXP-equivalents will then allow the private ISPs access into the overall telecommunications backbone of the state-owned ISPs providing a more robust system and encouraging local infrastructure construction through ISP competition. This would permit more people to gain household Internet access in suburban and more rural areas. In particular, IXPs can connect rural networks so that access to the Internet is not restricted primarily to the major cities IXPs are currently located in. In addition, private networks would be able to reroute traffic in the event of breaks to utilize the remaining connections. Ideally, local ISPs could connect to an India-wide network supported by the government, and a stable organization with experts would be in command of the IXP-equivalents.

While the Indian government has historically been involved in building telecommunications, as a result of current political challenges due to upcoming election seasons and general social issues, we could not find references to either this issue or proposal. This is indicative of one of the main problems that IXP implementations face - notably a lack of political will and a lack of understanding of the benefits. Large ISPs have less incentive to form IXPs because they handle the outages and routing better than smaller ISPs and IXPs would therefore benefit smaller ISPs more. Therefore, in cases with only a few large ISPs dominating the market, it is often necessary for the government and other organizations to provide the motivation for IXP formation. These recommendations can help the ITU induce this motivation.

By doing this, India could spur development in telecom companies within its own borders and both domestic and foreign Internet firms could gain access to one of the largest markets in the world - there is great possibility for sustainability due to public and private capital. This outline of policy initiatives is not a panacea to ensure that the remaining 97% of Indians can have Internet access, but it would go a long way to adding resiliency and connectivity to India’s existing structure in the event of cable cuts. It would prevent the outages of 30-70% of the networks that occurred in the 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2013 cable faults. In addition, India can leverage IXPs in a method reminiscent of Brazil in order to encourage the creation of more internal Internet infrastructure.

Policy Recommendation: Bangladesh

39 “Internet Exchange Operation” 40 Thakkar, Pooja 22 Challenges:

As described in Section 2, until recently, Bangladesh’s international Internet connection relied on a single submarine cable. With the advent of a land cable to India, their connection is much safer, provided that India’s Internet connections remain connected to the rest of the world. However, while Bangladesh may no longer be completely isolated in the event of a submarine cable fault, the cable outage in January of 2013 revealed that not all ISPs remain connected meaning that outages are still widespread. The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) regulates the Internet infrastructure in Bangladesh. The BTRC regulates both the IXP equivalents called National Internet eXchanges (NIX) and international connection points called International Internet Gateways (IIG). Over one hundred ISPs are registered with the BTRC. However, while there are a large number of ISPs, there are severe limitations and controls on access to IXPs and IIGs.41 Only one company, the Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited (BSCCL), controls access to the submarine cable line.42 The BSCCL is a for-profit company run by a consortium of 16 firms across 14 nations. In addition, there are few entities willing to invest in building NIXs or IIGs since the market is so controlled by so few players. Creating competition is the biggest challenge.

While a new cable, the SEA-ME-NE 5 cable is expected to be completed in 2014 with significantly increased speeds, the fact remains that it will still follow the track of the SEA-ME-NE 4 - the existing submarine cable - and therefore it will remain vulnerable to breakage in the Red Sea. In addition, the SEA-ME-NE 5 will also be under the control of the BSCCL.

Solutions:

In order to encourage the building of IXPs, we advocate preventing the BSCCL from continuing be the sole provider of “bandwidth access to all the telecom operators”.43 While the Bangladeshi government regulates the price, the fact remains that with increased Internet demand, the monopoly will reduce the number of providers in the market and will continue to discourage investment in IXP development and prevent the creation of internal infrastructure. there are significant barriers to entry for a competitor to the BSCCL, no single company can help diversify the marketplace for International Internet connectivity.

Rather than advocating the division of the BSCCL, which has acted well over the course of Bangladesh’s telecommunications history, the ITU can directly aid in the joining of multiple Bangladeshi ISPs (several of whom are members) in the placing of a new IIG/IXP on top of the new submarine cable line, either run by a non-profit company - as is the case in India - or under a neutral government arbiter such as in Malaysia. That way, the existing ISPs which do not control NIXs or IIGs of their own would have access to the new high-speed cable line without having to pass through BSCCL or other competitors. By doing so, the Bangladeshi government would enable their own ISPs to build their own networks and frameworks. While widespread

41 Rahman, M.S 42 “Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Overview” 43 “Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Overview”

23 NIX/IIG growth would be preferable, ISPs must first to be able to fairly access international Internet network. By taking this action, the ITU can act in concert with their recommendations to ensure that competition will exist within Bangladesh, while bringing in the benefits of IXPs to the nation.

Bangladesh acts as a model for much of Southeast Asia. The vast majority of nations there struggle with connectivity due to the Strait of Luzon bottleneck, and while many have an existing infrastructure, few can claim that they have mitigated the risks of the bottleneck and democratized access to the current cable lines. As a result, our policy recommendations can be modified and applied to these nations.

24 4. Support for Policy Recommendations

In the previous section, we presented policy recommendations advocating the construction of more IXPs and local data centers in various countries. We illustrated how IXPs can help mitigate inherent vulnerabilities contained in the submarine cable network - especially in cases where tromboning occurs. In this section, we provide additional support for our policy recommendations by further detailing the benefits of IXPs and local data centers. Specifically, we provide three case studies that serve to demonstrate the benefits of expanding the IXP network.

4.1 Case study: Kenya44

In Kenya, the Kenya Internet Exchange Point (KIXP) only used 64kbit/s at launch, but grew rapidly and now ranks among the world’s top 15 IXPs in terms of growth in traffic exchanged. Currently, KIXP localizes more than 1Gbit/s of peak traffic, dramatically reducing latency from 200-600ms to 2-10ms on average. At the same time, the ISPs credited all of their local traffic exchange to the impact of KIXP - stating that without KIXP all of their traffic would have to be re-routed through International transmission lines. This means without the IXP, all of the 1Gbit/s of peak traffic would be exchanged over expensive international transit connections (tromboning). Using some conservative values for wholesale services of international transit, local ISPs save almost $1.5 million per year by using KIXP to exchange local traffic.

In order to leverage the value of KIXP, Google installed a Google Global Cache (GGC) in Kenya, which can be seen as an instance of a local . This data center caches static content after it has been downloaded in Kenya, such as YouTube videos, and this had a significant impact on traffic levels in Kenya. A dramatic surge in traffic exchanged was seen after the data center was installed. This increase mostly reflects users’ increased usage of Google content, notably an increased willingness to stream YouTube videos based on lower latency of access.

On the revenue front, mobile operators in Kenya charge by amount of data consumption for Internet access, and IXPs effectively encourage user data consumption, as illustrated above. Thus, IXPs translate to increased revenue. An initial conservative estimate suggests an increase in mobile data by at least an additional traffic of 100Mbit/s per year or $6 million in revenues.

Finally, the benefits of the KIXP extend beyond the Kenyan borders, KIXP members are beginning to attract customers from neighboring countries due to the increased bandwidth and low latencies. In addition, Kenya is starting to attract external ISPs to exchange their own traffic at the KIXP. According to the study, as of January 2012, 56% of the Autonomous System numbers routed through the KIXP in the previous 6 months were from 16 foreign countries, a significant increase over previous years.

44 Kende, M. 25 4.2 Case study: Singapore45

To promote Singapore as a major information hub for the region, the Singapore Internet Exchange (SGIX) was established in 2009 as a neutral Internet Exchange to enhance the environment for local and international network traffic. Offering an efficient central point of traffic exchange for ISPs, the Internet Exchange has catalyzed the growth of Singapore’s information industry by encouraging content hosting and related developments such as the establishment of data centers.

The new IXP arrangement enabled customers of the ISPs to access local content from other ISPs even during cable outages which occur on the international network, such as those caused by earthquakes. Using a local exchange like SGIX also helped cut connectivity costs and improved the resiliency of their networks. It also reduced the latency their customers can experience when accessing local content.

In a recent study, the cost of routing local traffic through SGIX was estimated to be almost 95% cheaper than using international transit service, where local data is transferred outside of Singapore first before being routed back to the country. In fact, the cost of connecting to an IXP port is approximately $2700 per connection, which provides a capacity of 1000 Megabits per second (Mbps). The cost of using international transit service is about $50/Mbps, which means an IXP connection will only need to be utilized about 5.4% to even out the cost of connecting to it. Given that in real life, a lot of Internet traffic originating from Singapore is local to the country itself, 5.4% is an low utilization rate.

Today, local latency in Singapore is reduced to less than 10 milliseconds per transaction and an aggregate of over 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) of data have been transferred domestically among SGIX members. Moreover, each domestically exchanged transaction frees up an equal amount of international bandwidth, thereby improving connection speeds and reducing latency over Singapore’s international links as well.

4.3 Case Study: Brazil

Even though Brazil is not within Administrative Region E, it acts as a model of the effects of encouraging IXP development. As such we present Brazil as a model for encouraging IXP development.

It is noteworthy that Brazil itself embraces this approach. The organization of Brazil, the Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brazil, or CGI, has taken an aggressive stance on the building of IXPs. In 2010, the Brazilian Government launched its National Broadband Plan. This included policies to set up a new fiber optic backbone and to increase the number of IXPs to provide non-discriminatory access particularly for small and medium ISPs.46

From a single IXP in 2004, Brazil is now second only to the United States in total number of IXPs with 23 nationwide. Additionally, it has a 77% year-over-year increase in Internet

45 “Singapore Internet Exchange” 46 Cavalcanti, Daniel 26 bandwidth.47 A large portion of this bandwidth increase has resulted from the incentivization of ISPs into the market due to the easy access of citizens to multiple networks.

To effectively promote IXPs, Brazil utilized a stable government and leveraged its federal capital to invest in its telecom infrastructure. There is less incentive for ISPs, companies, and governments to fund the creation of an IXP when the nation itself is unstable and the security of the IXP itself is not ensured. While improving national stability is beyond the scope of this paper, we suggest that involvement by the ITUan help provide additional stableness and commitment to policy. In addition, for multinational organizations such as the ITU - which has estimated the cost of establishing an IXP at $40,000 - developing IXPs can be a project whose benefits for the development of local network infrastructure can outweigh the possible risks.48

Brazil is also an interesting case study for the colocation of data centers with IXPs. The data center market in Brazil is currently booming. Over the next three years 24% growth in the data center market is expected.49 Over 22,000 square feet of new colocation data center space will open in 2013.50 Despite the high projected and recent growth in data centers, there are still some issues. These increases in data centers in the past two year have resulted in a crunch for space. In addition, a recent study suggests that the high rates for electricity lower Brazil’s competitiveness as a data center market. Despite the other difficulties faced by Brazil. the growth in connectivity - due in part to increased IXPs - has resulted in a huge boom in the data center market.51

47 Woodcock, Bill 48 Jensen, Mike 49 “Brazil Datacenter Market..” 50 Fogarty, Kevin 51 Fogarty, Kevin 27 5. Analysis of Policy Recommendations

5.1 Avoiding Balkanization of the Internet

Since its advent, the Internet has become a symbol of borderless communication between individuals and of unlimited access to knowledge. In recent years, the concept of Balkanization of the Internet, or the process of fragmenting the Internet into distinct regions or states, has emerged in various sectors of the world. It is possible that our solution for providing more robust local networks may be misconstrued as advocating for Balkanization due to our suggestion of constructing more local exchange points.

However, building IXPs and encouraging co-location of data is not meant to fragment the Internet, but rather to help make it robust against such fragmentation. Having more robust local networks will not remove the need for international exchange of network traffic, rather it will improve the latency of local traffic, and help to minimize the effects of fragmentation through submarine cable cuts by rerouting as much traffic as possible. In addition, by enabling smaller local companies to provide better service to global customers, IXPs will encourage the growth of a global Internet economy.

In the case of disaster management, we believe that increasing the resiliency and connectivity in local regions actually helps reduce Balkanization by providing more convenient means of communication to the rest of the world. For example, robust Internet communication enables local police, fire, and medical personnel to react timely to crises, while at the same time facilitating cooperation between multiple safety agencies in the same region. In recent unfortunate disasters such as the Haiyan Typhoon in the Philippines, social media served as the number one source of information for public safety announcements and missing personnel search.52 In addition, many victims in affected regions have relied on basic Internet services to reach out for help and publicize food or shelter needs. Expanding affordable high-speed Internet locally will let more people reach the help they require, which may eventually come from elsewhere in the world. Hence, adding IXPs will lead to increased routing paths and expand global connectivity of the Internet overall. These goals defy the fragmentation concept encapsulated by Balkanization.

5.2 Political Challenges for Implementation

IXP/Mirror Server Relation:

One of the primary benefits of IXPs is indirect: the incentivization of companies to place mirror servers and data centers near the IXP in order to better provide services to the regions served by the IXP. However, this argument is dangerous because there is no guarantee that such servers or centers will actually be placed. While there are economic incentives to build

52Keating, Mike 28 data centers and mirror servers, companies may choose not to for any number of reasons including funding, security of the network frameworks, lack of sufficient technical skills to maintain the equipment in the country of choice, and zoning laws.

Funding

Funding as a deterrence depends almost entirely on the company considering the possibility of building data centers/mirror servers to be too expensive or not economical. However, companies can be incentivized by either subsidies by the nation(s) benefitting from the IXP or by less regulation in the zoning and other regulations of building data centers/servers. In addition, the lower latency of the IXP will make the option of a local data center more economical and publicizing the lower latency and colocation benefits might be sufficient. Countries with such policies would increase the investment in their countries and derive greater benefits from the IXP than countries without.

Security

Network security could be a huge discouraging factor: large companies - which hold a lot of data about consumers - rarely want to risk credibility by conceivably losing control of that data due to insecure frameworks. The responsibility then falls on the participating ISPs and the rules established by the IXP. Network security is already incentivized in the participating ISPs especially due to the opening of competition to each other - the ISP which possesses a secure framework will invariably motivate the others to increase digital security as well.

Lack of Technical Skills

Another problem that could prevent the growth of data centers around IXPs is a lack of technical skills in the local workforce. Data centers and mirror servers require constant physical maintenance. It may be difficult for countries to find qualified candidates in the local workforce. However, companies are able to outsource the labor costs or to bring in outside experts. In addition the available jobs would create a demand for experts in this field and encourage the growth of the local economy.

Zoning Laws

Data centers consume a huge amount of energy and water. Environmental groups often protest the data centers and lobby for laws to reduce the heavy consumption. As a result, in most countries, data centers and mirror servers are subject to zoning laws based on the size and scope of the undertaking.53 To promote the building data centers countries can provide favorable zoning laws and fewer restrictions. This must still be balanced however, to take the concerns of environmental groups into consideration and avoid alienating them.

5.3 Scalability of Local Replication

Some economists in the Asian region might argue that this solution assumes that it will

53 “Zoning For Data Centers” 29 be economically efficient for small companies to co-locate data and the Internet usage is still low at the Asian regions. In general, this local replication approach is very expensive and only suitable for companies such as Google or Facebook which provide services to millions of people across the world. They may argue that the infrastructure often takes millions of dollars to build, and the maintenance cost are also large. Therefore it is not economically efficient for the small companies to adapt.

However, while the local replication approach may not be economically efficient for small companies maintaining their own servers, it can still be economically efficient for groups of small companies. Recently a lot of companies have started to use cloud solutions as alternatives to hosting their own services. For instance, a lot of startups use the cloud computing solutions, such as Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Computing, Microsoft Azure, etc. These cloud-computing solutions distribute the cost over many small companies. Moreover, cloud-computing solutions require little overhead and maintenance by the small companies. At the scale that companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft host cloud services, they can provide these services to smaller companies at a more affordable price.

Internet growth is most dramatic in the Asia Pacific region. The Internet usage has growth at least 30% in the past decades and the penetration of the Internet usage in the Asian is only 27.6%.54 Everyday, there are more new Internet users are coming online in Asia than anywhere else in the world.55 The Internet users are looking for new business opportunities, entertainment and news, better ways to connect with friends and family, and many more. It is critical for global companies to seize these opportunities through the solutions such as local replication. Realizing this trend and the potential from Asia, Amazon, and Google both announced to the build data centers in the Asian regions, such as Taiwan and Singapore in early 2010. They are building this data center to make sure that their users across Asia have the fastest and most reliable access to all of services. All of their planned data centers have been completed in the middle of 2013 and they are currently fully operational.

5.4 Effectiveness of the Local Replication

Some content providers may claim that because information is very sensitive and needs to be constantly updated, local replication would only remove a small portion of the dependency of the international network. This is because the local replication must be synchronized with the main server periodically. This issue is particularly severe for services that require constant updates such as news, stock prices, Facebook status updates, and Twitter feeds. Therefore data may quickly become outdated after a cable fault.

However, while this argument correctly states that some portion of the international traffic over submarine cables is still essential even with IXPs, it is only valid if a small portion of the network traffic is local - in particular a small enough portion that the benefits of routing this locally are miniscule. In reality, this is not the case. Domestic or local traffic is a much larger portion of the total traffic. For the case of Africa, the domestic traffic accounts for a large proportion. When this large proportion of domestic traffic reroute locally, the economic benefit can be immense, as

54 Miniwatt Marketing Group 55 Cisco, “Forecast and Methodology” 30 evidenced in the earlier analysis.

In addition, the argument overestimates the frequency at which most Internet data changes. In general, we can categorize the contents on the Internet into the two types - static content and dynamic content. Static content often refers to content that does not change, or does not change dramatically over a short period of time such as YouTube videos. Dynamic content refers to content that changes more often, such as stock prices, Facebook updates, etc.

While dynamic content that is hosted internationally may still need to be transferred via the submarine cable network, static content - even international static content - can take advantage of local caching. For example, when a user accesses YouTube videos, the local replication of the YouTube services will reduce latency and eliminate the need to route the request through submarine cables. Some of the most popular YouTube videos have been played several billion times around the world. Without the local replication, the customers will not have the same experience, such as fast playing speed and high quality video after a submarine cable fault.

Internet users in Hong Kong watched 447 million videos, 52.4% of all videos viewed online are from Google.56 Without any surprise, YouTube service accounted for more than 99% of all videos viewed within the Google traffic in Hong Kong.57 Hong Kong users are very active on the Google Services and we can see the same trend in the other Asian countries, such as India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Philippines. Seeing this Asian trend, YouTube launched its Malaysian domain, its third in Southeast Asia, after Singapore and the Philippines in 2012.58 Google said the localized services offered a local interface for people to easily and quickly find videos most relevant to them. Mostly importantly, without the local replications, this optimization would not be possible.

5.5 Privacy Issues

Privacy activists around the world might concern about the privacy issues raised with building the local replications and data centers. Data centers are subjected to the local laws of the country where they are located. Particularly for multinational companies storing data about users from different countries, multiple privacy laws may apply to the data. In addition it is possible for a government to mandate a company turn over the records stored in a local data center.

This is a valid claim, and must be taken into consideration while adapting our recommendation. We outline some important principles that we think the countries should adopt. In order to mitigate this issue, countries should adopt policies that balance protecting the privacy of user data with allowing flexibility in the storage of such data. One way to do this is to mandate security measures for data centers such as encryption at rest. In addition, protections for foreign user data or all user data might be considered. Such restrictions satisfy the need to protect privacy while also allow flexibility in the location of data storage. Facebook’s local

56 "Hong Kong Usage Patterns" 57 "Hong Kong Usage Patterns" 58 Yap, Jamie 31 replicated instance in Europe do not have facial recognition features and European users’ data is only allowed to be stored locally due to European regulations. However, the best regulations for privacy are out of the scope of this paper and we will not address them it in detail.

32 6. Conclusion

In this paper, we detail existing vulnerabilities in the submarine cable network and suggest these vulnerabilities as a motivation for building robust local networks through IXPs. We then outline previous solutions and review past arguments for the benefits of IXPs. Finally, we recommend policies to mitigate outages and latency from submarine cable faults in Asia and Australasia (Administrative Region E) of the ITU through construction of new IXPs.

In order to demonstrate the need for IXPs we show vulnerabilities in the existing submarine cable network. An individual cable is vulnerable to accidental damage to the point of being completely cut. These cable cuts - particularly when they involve multiple cables - can result in significant loss of connectivity and increased latency across an entire region. The impact of this outage on commerce and communication can be devastating. We also noted that, barring the expensive and long-term task of laying new cables, there is no feasible method to prevent these dangers. Finally, we show that Asia and Australasia are particularly susceptible to major outages due to submarine cable faults due to their position between two cable bottleneck (increasing the likelihood of multi-cable faults) and their lack of local infrastructure and routing options.

Therefore, we recommend an increased emphasis on IXP development. Apart from shifting reliance away from submarine cable systems and avoiding tromboning, increasing the number of IXPs brings several additional benefits Asia and Australasia. First, IXPs allow local exchanges of traffic between different ISPs, which significantly reduce the latency of local traffic so end users perceive a faster, more reliable Internet. Moreover, investments in IXPs increase the general efficiency of the international network since routing more traffic through IXPs offloads the burden from international transit cables. Finally, IXPs improve network performance accelerate business development by providing new opportunities for innovation, expansion, and e-commerce. Broadband networks attract investment to areas that would not otherwise be viable to many businesses such as rural areas. This is essential to the broader policy goal of encouraging free flow of information over the net, as well as offering a diverse set of resources to the global market.

From a reliability viewpoint, IXPs provide an extra layer of guarantee for essential services in regions that suffer from lack of stability in international network systems. When international transit cables are unavailable due to submarine cable cuts, IXPs offer a channel of communication among local ISPs and enable them to provide basic Internet services to end users, such as emails and instant messages among the local regional community. In an emergency situation, this maintains quality of victim-to-responder communications by enabling digital transmissions to and from the public, like real-time public safety announcements sent over local ISP networks. Expanding affordable local network services will let more people reach the resources they require, and allow basic emergency services to operate unaffected. In addition, IXPs allow the rerouting of traffic from all ISPs along the remaining cables.

In India, we recommend the ITU leverage their existing connections with the Indian government and their Sector Members including the largest ISPs to encourage IXP development, tying existing national ISP infrastructures into the private local ISPs as India has the capital to invest. Political precedence for government intervention and huge unexplored markets would

33 attract public and private capital, and there exists a non-profit company to manage IXP-equivalents and act as a neutral arbiter between different ISPs through whom efforts can be channeled.

In Bangladesh, we recommend that the ITU use the ICT-D fund to create either a similar nonprofit or a multi-stakeholder consortium using their own Bangladeshi IXP connections to provide a public, neutral IXP on the upcoming submarine cable so that the current monopoly upon submarine cable access does not continue. Such an IXP would allow the numerous ISPs within the country competitive access to international networks and provide a more democratized system of infrastructure development in Bangladesh which has been absent in the face of IXP-equivalents in Bangladesh being controlled by a small number of for-profit companies.

Our specific recommendations toward India and Bangladesh are applicable to other nations in South and Southeast Asia as the vast majority of those nations are plagued by the same systemic problems. India and Bangladesh act as representatives of large and small nations with differing levels of telecom infrastructure which are affected by submarine cable bottlenecks and lack effective local networks. We present the case studies of Kenya, Singapore, and Brazil to show that policies encouraging IXPs can have huge benefits for a variety of regions and countries.

Our recommendations are neither comprehensive nor panaceas to the inherent problems within the submarine cable network. However, they will act to mitigate the potential damage and aid in the ITU’s goal of “equitable, sustainable and affordable access” to information technologies for all the world’s members.59

59 ITU 34 Appendix I: Glossary

Caching A collection of duplicated data stored elsewhere on same machine.

Co-locating data The act of placing multiple data entries within a single location.

Data Center A facility that used to house computer, data storage, and etc.

Exclusive Economic Zone An exclusive economic zone is a seazone prescribed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea over which a state has special rights over the exploration and use of marine resources, including energy production from water and wind.

Internet Backbone The principal routes between large, strategically interconnected networks.

Internet Service Provider (ISP) A business or organization that offers users access to the Internet.

Internet Exchange Point (IXP) A physical infrastructure that Internet service providers exchange Internet traffic.

Latency The time delay between the cause and the effect of machines.

Mirror Server The backup server in case of the failure of the main production server.

Tromboning The phenomenon of routing local network traffic through international transit lines such that the data leaves the origin country before looping back.

35 Appendix II: Data on Submarine Cable Vulnerabilities

History of Submarine Cable Wiretapping

The submarine cables are historically insecure with regards to wiretapping. During the Cold War, the Operation Ivy Bells was carried out successfully by the United Stated Navy, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA). The mission of the operation was to place wire tapes on the Soviet submarine communication cables.60 In addition, the United States Secret Services has detected espionage equipments were illegally hooked into Verizon’s fiber optic sub-network. This network was close to a mutual fund company and the incident happened just before this company published the quarterly results. The investigating authorities believed that this was business espionage[4].

Most recently, the NSA has been accused of tapping into submarine cables. In particular, it was accused of tapping international cables.61 The operation, codenamed Fairview, provoked reactions from other countries. Brazil has been concerned with the NSA wiretapping of fiber optic cables and announced plans to build its own submarine cable to Europe in order to bypass the US-centric network.62 In addition, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters was accused of tapping the cables that pass through Britain as well.63 Due to their information density - terabits per second - and their unguarded international nature, submarine cables make large scale wiretapping particularly easy.

Analysis of Vulnerability to Intentional Cuts

In addition to wiretapping there is the possibility of intentional damage to cables. Many countries only have a few submarine cables connected to them. Fishing, piracy, ship anchors, and other human activities account for more than 60% of submarine cable cuts. While the majority of these have been accidents up to now, due to the severe effects of cable cuts, it is possible that cables could become targets of terrorist organizations or be targeted as part of a larger war. During the World War I, British officials were ordered to cut the major German cables shortly after declaring a war on Germany[1]. During the Cold War, there were a series of twelve unusual breaks occurred in the five American trans-Atlantic communications cables. Later on, Soviet trawler Novorossiysk was identified and there were sufficient evidences from the investigation to show that cables were cut by the people from the Novorossiysk[2] although the Soviet Union denied such claim and stated the investigation was unjustified.

In particular the chart below shows the number of submarine cable connection points to a country and the e-intensity score of that country - a metric determined by the Boston Consulting Group that measures a country's reliance on the Internet. The size of points indicates the countries GDP64.

60 Hoffman, David 61 Toor, Amar 62 Toor, Amar 63 "GCHQ Taps Fibre-optic Cables for Secret...” 64 “The 2012 BCG e-Intensity Index” 36 Note that most countries can be disconnected from the submarine cable network by 7 or fewer cuts. These cables are partially armoured but not actively defended. They are well-marked on maps and often cut accidentally by things as simple as fishing trawlers, suggesting that a fleet of a few fishing boats might take out most of a country’s Internet capacity. This is particularly concerning for large countries with a higher Internet reliance such as India. In addition, note that countries tend to fall into three groups. First the countries in blue such as US, UK, France, and Japan have a high e-intensity score and a large number of cables making them reliant of the submarine cable network but difficult to detach from it. Next, the countries in yellow such as China, Italy, India, etc. have a lower e-intensity score and low numbers of cables. This means there is a lower impact of isolating them but that it is easier to do so. Finally, countries in red such as the Netherlands, Norway and Singapore, have a high e-intensity score and a low number of cables. These countries would be significantly easier to disconnect while causing a large amount of damage.

37 Appendix III: Past Attempts to Mitigate Submarine Cable Vulnerabilities

Policy makers from around the world have attempted to reduce the vulnerability of submarine cables directly. While substantial improvements have been made, due to their length, private ownership, international nature, location in major shipping lanes, and exposure to environmental hazards, submarine cables have proven difficult to protect.

Submarine cables are protected under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This convention regulates the laying of cables through international waters and the response to breaking or repair of these cables. In particular, countries must this allow the laying of cables through their exclusive economic zone, which is a seazone prescribed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea over which a state has special rights over the exploration and use of marine resources. However, they have the right to regulate such activities within their territorial waters - up to 12 miles off shore.65 Under this convention, within territorial waters, companies must generally get permits for repairs. However, “60% of all cable cuts occur in waters less than 100 meters deep,” which means many cable faults occur in these zones making repair difficult and often resulting in delays due to permitting. For example, China - which requires a permit even for repairs beyond territorial waters - has delayed issuing permits for up to two weeks, while the average delay is roughly one week.66 This is something that is difficult to mandate on an international level and requires a cooperation and political will among many nation that is rarely present. In addition, the issue is further complicated by multiple countries claiming the same waters further confusing the permit issue. While individual countries can streamline their repair process, submarine cables often run through the territorial waters of multiple countries - who may have different or unstable governments - making standardizing this process difficult.

To fill the gaps left by the UNCLOS, an international organization called the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) was formed. The ICPC promotes the awareness of submarine cables as critical infrastructure that must be protected. In particular, it helps on laying down the international agreement on cable installation, protection, and maintenance for all the parties. However, this committee lacks the ability to enforce its standards. Therefore regulation and changes in policy have often occurred only on a country and company basis leaving the majority of a cable or network still vulnerable.

For an example of country regulation, Australia and New Zealand have established protection zones around cables to prevent the accidental faults that fishing trawlers and ship’s anchors often cause when they cut the cables.67 This has not yet been adopted by other countries however. In addition, they are difficult to enforce in busy shipping lanes such as the Straits of Luzon or the Straits of Malacca where many submarine cables run.

Companies have also increased the protection of the cables. The first submarine cable was a copper wire coated with a resin and without any other form of protection in the early 19th

65 United Nations 66 Wargo, Robert 67 “Critical Infrastructure” 38 century. Over the past century, strong outer layer protections, such as the copper pipe, insulation layer, armored wire, armored wire holder and many more have helped to construct a stronger submarine cable. However, these cables are still susceptible to earthquakes, typhoons, and even just shipping anchors. In addition, the regulation of the protections for these cables lies outside the scope of international law under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and varies by company.

39 Appendix IV: Latency and Internet Quality

One of the problems with relying solely on submarine cables is the high latency which can result from their overuse. In this appendix, we elaborate on the concept of latency, study its importance, analyze its effects on cost and quality of Internet applications, and finally transition into ways of mitigating problems associated with submarine cables.

Introduction to Latency

Latency refers to delays incurred in processing network data. A low-latency network means a connection experiences small delay times when transferring data from one end to the other. A high-latency network generally suffers from long delays. Latency is often confused with bandwidth. Bandwidth is usually quoted in terms of Megabits per second (Mbps) and only gives an idea of the capacity of the network not the total time taken for data transfer.

Importance of Latency

Having outlined the concept of latency, it should have become apparent why it is an important metric for the Internet. Even a high-speed network can suffer from latency problems and function like a low-speed network if routing is inefficient. Today, even a simple web page can contain hundreds of separate components. As latency increases, the request time for each piece of data goes up, which in total potentially renders the entire web page unviewable. This problem is only exacerbated when applied to other Internet applications with low-latency requirements, such as voice-over-IP, video streaming and real-time teleconferencing.

From a performance perspective, decreasing latency has several benefits: ● Allows more requests to happen concurrently ● Shortens the content requisition time and brings content to the user faster ● Improves efficiency of the Internet since lower latency typically implies more efficient data routing

Cost versus Latency

After presenting the importance of building a network with low latency, we turn to the question of cost versus latency. Obviously, building infrastructure to address latency issues increases the cost, which is associated with extra cables, more routing points and purchasing intelligent software systems. Companies typically want to strike a balance between cost and latency to provide useable service without excessive expenditures. However, reasonable investment into lowering latency is necessary to guarantee basic levels of service at times. The baseline for latency differs across applications:68

● Regular Websites: 100-800 milliseconds (ms) ● Heavy Websites: 400-1200 ms ● Web-based Applications: 30-300 ms

68 “Some interesting bits about latency” 40 ● Action Online Games: 10-150 ms ● Real-time Video Conferencing: 10-100 ms ● Stock Exchange: 5-100 ms

While regular websites can tolerate higher latencies, applications such as real-time video conferencing and stock exchange operations rely on low latency to be effective. In extreme cases such as high-frequency stock trading, a difference of one millisecond translates into millions of dollars. Although this number does not apply to most everyday online consumer services, it gives insight to how important lowering latency can be.

41 Appendix V: Data on IXPs and Local Data Centers

First, we explore the correlation between IXPs and local data centers. In recent years, as IXPs have proliferated, the number of data centers and their distributions have increased as well. In 1995 there were believed to be around 200 data centers. In 2010, that number has increased to 1,100.69 During the same time period, the number of IXPs has increased dramatically as well.

In order to determine the relationship between IXPs and data centers we first compare the approximate numbers of IXPs and data centers in each country using data from Package Clearing House70 and Data Center Map.71

Note the US is not included in the second graph in order to better show the relation between IXPs and datacenters in non-US countries as the US is on a dramatically different scale from other countries with over a thousand data centers and nearly 200 IXPs.

In the second graph, we take a closer look at the correlation between IXPs and local data centers in non-US countries:

69 “Will Data Center History Repeat Itself?" 70 "Packet Clearing House Report ...” 71 "Data Center Map" 42 To get the data in the graphs above, we use the approximation of country IXPs found at Packet Clearing House72 and the approximation of colocation data centers in each country found at the data center Map.73 It should be noted that these are approximations and for many countries - such as China - it is difficult to obtain reliable data on Internet infrastructure. In the graph below, the size of the dot correspond to the GDP of the country while the horizontal axis is the number of IXPs and the vertical axis is the number of data centers. We examined data for 15 countries: United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, Germany, India, France, Canada, China, Italy, Brazil, Russia, Australia, , Saudi Arabia, Argentina, South Africa, Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt, Iceland, Netherlands, Singapore, Norway, and the United States.

Countries in the lower left such as South Africa, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have few IXPs and few data centers. These are often small or developing nations. Countries near the middle including China, Italy, India, Canada, Australia, and Russia have more data centers and IXPs. Note that many of these have larger economies and are more developed. One interesting outlier is Brazil - a developing nation that has built a lot of IXPs, but where data centers have not yet colocated. It is interesting to note that Brazil’s data centers are increasing dramatically with growth of 24% forecast over the next three years.74

Statistically, a correlation was observed between IXPs and data centers with an r-squared value around .2 without including the US (an outlier as the number of IXPs and data centers are significantly larger) or .9 with the US.

However, to be sure that the correlation is due to the IXPs attracting colocated data centers, one must examine whether IXPs and data centers may be correlated through a third variable. In order to determine this a few other measures were examined. Notably, the Human

72 "Packet Clearing House Report ...” 73 "Data Center Map" 74 "Brazil Datacenter Market Booms With ...” 43 Development index of a country, the e-intensity index, and the GDP. Neither the Human Development index of a country, the e-intensity index was particularly correlated for the countries examined (r-squared value of less than .1). The GDP had the most significant correlation with the number of IXPs and data centers in a country. For data centers versus GDP the r-squared value is .19 without including the United States and .79 including the US. For IXP versus GDP the r-squared value is identically .19 without including the United States and .80 including the US. This indicates that it is difficult to separate the correlation of IXPs and data centers from other confounding variables by examining large scale studies of countries. Despite the difficulty in showing causation, there is evidence for a correlation between IXPs and data centers across nations. In addition, the examination of particular case studies in Kenya, Singapore, and Brazil suggest that building IXPs does encourage colocation of data centers.

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50