As many of our readers know, Qrator.Radar is constantly researching global BGP connectivity, as well as regional. Since the Internet stands for “Interconnected Networks,” to ensure the best possible quality and speed the interconnectivity of individual networks should be rich and diverse, with their growth motivated on a sound competitive basis.

The fault-resistance of an internet connection in any given region or country is tied to the number of alternate routes between ASes. Though, as we stated before in our Internet Segments Reliability reports, some paths are obviously more critical compared to the others (for example, the paths to the Tier-1 transit ISPs or autonomous systems hosting authoritative DNS servers), which means that having as many reachable routes as possible is the only viable way to ensure adequate system scalability, stability and robustness.

This time, we are going to have a closer look at the Russian Federation internet segment. There are reasons to keep an eye on that segment: according to the numbers provided by the RIPE database, there are 6183 autonomous systems in Russia, out of 88664 registered worldwide, which stands for 6.87% of total.

This percentage puts Russia on a second place in the world, right after the USA (30.08% of registered ASes) and before Brazil, owning 6.34% of all autonomous systems. Effects of changes in the Russian connectivity could be observed across many other countries dependant on or adjacent to that connectivity, and ultimately by almost any ISP in the world.

The overview

In IPv4 ISPs from Russian Federation announce 33933 out of 774859 globally visible prefixes, which translates into 4.38% and puts Russian internet segment on the fifth place of such rating. Those, explicitly RU-announced prefixes cover 4.3*10^7 of unique IP-addresses out of 2.9*10^9 announced globally - 1.51%, 11th place.

In IPv6 ISPs from Russian Federation announce 1831 out of 65532 globally visible prefixes, which is 2.79% and place 7. Those prefixes cover 1.3*10^32 of unique IPv6 addresses out of 1.5*10^34 globally announced - 0.84%, 18th place.

One of many ways to evaluate the country’s Internet connectivity and reliability is to rank the autonomous systems within the country by the number of prefixes announced. This method is vulnerable to route deaggregation, which is gradually balanced eventually by the excessive filtering of the de-aggregated prefixes in the ISP equipment due to the constant inevitable growth of route tables, which consumes memory.

The individual scale

Table 1. AS size by the prefix count

We use the aggregated size of announced address space as a more reliable metric of comparable size for the autonomous system which reflects the autonomous systems potential and scalability limit. Such metric is not always relevant in IPv6 due to both RIPE NCC’s existing IPv6 address allocation policies and the redundancy in the protocol design. That is continuously balanced by the growth of IPv6 segment within the Russian internet segment and IPv6 BCP evolution.