Study of the sustainability of national segments of the network

Top 20 sustainable regions for 2017 on the world map

The Internet as a system of networks that interact through the nodes of telecom operators (autonomous systems - AU), the more stable the more alternative routes between the AUs, the simple principle of fault tolerance. This study demonstrates how the failure of a single but most significant operator in the region affects the global availability of the national segment.

The global availability of any telecom operator is affected by its paths to Tier-1 operators. Tier-1 - transnational / transcontinental operators providing global connectivity between continents and countries.
')
If there are no paths to Tier-1 operators, the operator will not have global accessibility.

Suppose that a given operator is experiencing problems, and, accordingly, the passage of traffic through it is difficult or impossible. We decided to find the answer to the question: “What percentage of the remaining telecom operators in the region will lose indirect communication with Tier-1 operators, and hence global accessibility?”.

Why do we simulate such a situation? Strictly speaking, when modern Internet was conceived, it was assumed that each operator would have at least two independent upstream vendors, which guarantees fault tolerance in case of problems of one of them. However, for many networks, this remained a recommendation on paper. Therefore, the failure of a single operator can lead to systemic problems for a whole set of downstream telecom operators, even to the inaccessibility of entire national segments. But do major transit operators fail in the real world? The answer is yes, and with enviable regularity. And if there has not been a single gap, then it is worth remembering the law of Murphy: "What can happen will happen."

The modeling process was divided into the following steps:

1. We built alternative routes to Tier-1 operators for each speaker in the world using the model of relations between speakers of the Qrator.Radar project;
2. Using the Maxmind geobase, we compared the address space of the AU to different countries;
3. For each speaker, we normalized the received geodata to avoid a situation where the speaker has a degenerate presence in the region. An example of such a degenerate presence is Hong Kong, where there are hundreds of operators on the largest Asian Internet Exchange, HKIX, and they have nothing to do with accessibility in Hong Kong itself;
4. Further, the impact of the hypothetical failure of a given AS on other communication operators, and as a result, on the national segments was assessed;
5. For each country, the AU was allocated, the effect of the failure of which will have the greatest impact on the other AU of the country.

Below is a table of the top 20 sustainable countries in 2017 and recalculated according to the new top 20 for 2016.

% failure	2016 year	Change 2016 - 2017	2017 year	% failure
2.57478	Germany (DE)	1 place	Germany (DE)	2.29696
3.14068	Canada (CA)	Down 2 positions	Hong Kong (HK)	2.65659
3.46469	Switzerland (CH)	3rd place	Switzerland (CH)	3.57245
4.03446	United Kingdom (GB)	Down 2 positions	Canada (CA)	3.67367
4.19754	Hong Kong (HK)	Up 3 positions	France (FR)	3.68254
4.34753	Ukraine (UA)	Down 2 positions	United Kingdom (GB)	3.76297
4.39691	United States (US)	Down 2 positions	Belgium (BE)	3.93768
4.83975	Belgium (BE)	Up 1 position	Ukraine (UA)	3.95098
5.68121	Spain (ES)	Down 8 positions	United States (US)	3.97103
5.78643	Poland (PL)	Down 6 positions	Bangladesh (BD)	5.29293
5.99955	France (FR)	Up on 6 positions	Romania (RO)	5.35451
6.00547	Russia (RU)	Down 1 position	Brazil (BR) - newcomer	5.39138
6.39252	Australia (AU)	Departure from the top 20	Russia (RU)	5.73432
6.88687	Ireland (IE)	14th place	Ireland (IE)	5.87254
7.0508	Romania (RO)	Up on 4 positions	Czech Republic (CZ) - Newbie	5.88389
7.43945	Austria (AT)	Down by 3 positions	Poland (PL)	5.99655
7.84456	Italy (IT)	Departure from the top 20	Bulgaria (BG)	6.20975
7.97141	Bangladesh (BD)	Up 8 positions	Spain (ES)	6.58064
8.14681	Bulgaria (BG)	Up 2 positions	Austria (AT)	7.14221
8.15989	Philippines (PH)	Departure from the top 20	Luxembourg (LU) - newcomer	7.28208

As you can see, there are several permutations in this list, but in this case it cannot be said that with a difference of tenths of a percent, there is some fundamental change in quality. Speaking about the top 20, and about other countries, the refusal in which a single operator leads to the inaccessibility of no more than 10% of the regional AU (29 such countries) - all these countries have a fairly diversified market for IP transit services, with a large number of alternative routes .


Separately, it is worth noting the strong influence of AS 174, the Cogent operator, on a whole range of European national segments: France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Ireland only in the top 20 sustainable regions. That is, the occurrence of problems in the autonomous system 174 may lead to problems in the group of neighboring regions. Although not complete inaccessibility, as we are talking about well-developed and actively decentralized national networks.

In Russia, there are no surprises. Rostelecom remains the backbone operator, but even its hypothetical offline will result in inaccessibility of no more than 5.73% of Russian telecom operators. At the same time, the percentage of refusals, comparable to last year’s, provides Russia with only 13th place in the ranking. There are practically no networks of international Tier-1 operators in Russia, however, the domestic market is represented by a whole set of large and medium Tier-2 networks, which ensures such high stability.

Is the largest operator in the region always the greatest influence on the availability of other operators? As shown by our calculations - not necessarily. For example, in Germany, the largest telecom operator is Deutsche Telecom, but from the point of view of global connectivity, the failure of AS8881, owned by Versatel, will have the greatest impact on the AU in the region. And according to our estimates, the trend towards the increasing importance of Tier-2 operators will continue in the near future.

Speaking about global trends, the average “instability” in 2017 was 41%, which is 1.6% lower than a year earlier.


Gradient from dark green (0%), through yellow (25%) to red (50%) color, indicating the degree of dependence of the segment from a single supplier.

The greatest positive changes for the year occurred in the developing market of Africa. Thus, sustainability in several countries in the region, including the Gambia and Liberia, has increased by almost 40%. However, the movement towards increasing the stability of national segments cannot be called unidirectional. For example, the dependence of the national segment of Jamaica to the failure of a single operator has increased from 34% to 91%, the external connectivity of this country is now almost entirely dependent on the work of the AC 23520 (Columbus Networks).


Regions with 99% or more dependency on a single supplier.

At the very bottom of our rating there are 10 territories, which in case of failure of a single operator / autonomous system will experience 100% inaccessibility from the point of view of the rest of the world. Of the countries of the post-Soviet space, Uzbekistan is closest to them, located on 235 place with a value of 99.94% of inaccessibility due to the failure of AS 28910. The rest of the countries are island microstates.

In addition to the countries already mentioned, Cuba and South Sudan are the most well-known reader countries with more than 99% dependence on a single communications provider. North Korea has 92%. It is curious that Monaco has very poor connectivity (the only red dot in Europe), while another micro-state, Luxembourg, closes the top 20 sustainable countries in 2017.

Against the background of growing cyber threats and more and more emerging news about attacks on the Internet infrastructure, governments, companies and users from countries where resiliency is less than 50%, and 25% in an amicable way, you should seriously think about your own situation. We have already seen large-scale attacks on the largest national providers and major service providers of connectivity and availability, such as DNS-providers, as well as the consequences of such attacks in terms of the availability of a network resource for a specific user from anywhere in the world.

The results of the study demonstrate that the market of telecom operators, built on the principle of competition, ultimately turns out to be much more resilient both to problems within and outside the region. In the opposite case, the disconnection of a single provider can lead to the unavailability of network resources from a significant proportion of users of the whole country or region.