Peering Mistake

Hello,

I am a Vodafone user and I use a lot of Cloudflare-proxied services (websites and the Cloudflare DNS) so I want my ping to Cloudflare to be low. One thing that grabbed my attention was Vodafone (AS1273) peers Cloudflare (AS13335) directly, but only on IPv6, which Vodafone's router is not compatible with. On IPv4, it goes through Telia or NTT. I believe this is only a mistake and neither of those parties benefit from it (furthermore it likely increases Vodafone's transit costs). How can I let Vodafone know about this? Customer support and forum team may not know whom to ask about peering, and I presume Vodafone's peering e-mail address would welcome only companies and not individuals.

This is not something you can get involved with.

Whether Vodafone choose to peer with Cloudflare (or vice versa) is *entirely* at the discretion of the two parties. Don't kid yourself that this is accidental: they are very aware of who they do and do not peer with, and the commercial reasons behind those decisions. This is about money and market power, not ping times.

As for IPv6, there is a lot of politics going on, with content providers and smaller networks vying against the established Tier 1 networks. You don't want to know.

Vodafone's international network, acquired from Cable and Wireless, has a peering policy that is selective, not open.

Vodafone UK have 3 AS numbers, 1273, 2529 and 5378, and peer with Cloudflare on none of them. Looking at a couple of Vodafone subsidiaries with their own AS, Iceland and South Africa, they don't peer with Cloudflare either. These may be sitting behind 1273 of course.

They do peer with various CDNs, Cloudflare is conspicuous by its absence which makes me think it's not inadvertent. Vodafone will have a breakdown of traffic by AS and will be quite aware how much flows to Cloudflare.

I wonder if Vodafone aren't fans of Cloudflare's peering policy, or vice-versa, and note that Vodafone themselves state that levels of traffic and prefixes being advertised via their network can fluctuate due to their being used as a backup transit AS by large carriers.

https://www.cloudflare.com/peering-policy/

Our network is a global anycast network. We determine the scope of routes to send you based upon your network's scope and footprint in relation to our point of interconnect.

We request max-prefix sizes of 2000 for IPv4 and 500 for IPv6.

We provision our configuration automatically from PeeringDB, please ensure your entry is kept up-to-date including IP addresses and number of prefixes announced.

Below from Vodafone's peering policy:

Max-prefix limit recommended:

90,000-100,000 (v4)
1,000 (v6)
Our prefix count can be vary variable as we are used as a backup upstream for several large carriers. Please set it high to prevent session flaps

100GE PNIs preferred.

Edited by CarlTSpeak (Fri 03-Jan-20 14:59:08)

Thank you CarlTSpeak and candlerb, now I understand that there's nothing I can do about the two-sided market nature of peering.

Check https://portal.vodafone.com/web/lookingglass if curious as to what the international Vodafone network connects with.

Do also check that you are actually using that network rather than the UK only one. Vodafone UK have a different AS which has some capacity into LINX, so don't appear to have been moved entirely behind the international network.

Likely same as Virgin Media - uses parent company to reach various destinations but has own transit and peering, too.

You're right - Vodafone UK customers are given different BGP routes. Traceroutes from other countries to 1.1.1.1 involve transit, but here's my traceroute from the UK:

2 host-212-158-XXX-XXX.dslgb.com (212.158.XXX.XXX) 5.285 ms 5.370 ms 5.255 ms
3 63.130.XXX.XXX (63.130.XXX.XXX) 11.971 ms 11.911 ms 11.613 ms
4 ixmanchester.as13335.net (195.66.244.71) 12.138 ms 37.980 ms 36.124 m

which uses LINX and zero transit! Thank you - still it's sad for international customers.

That network is a carrier network rather than one serving customers directly. Should be up to the individual Vodafone subsidiaries to handle connectivity to Cloudflare locally - that AS is actually a transit provider in its own right.