Labs.APNIC has a pretty cool system to measure this kind of stuff by deploying specially crafted google ads, see "How Big is that Network?" https://labs.apnic.net/?p=526, and APNIC is able to assess the population behind a network based on ad placement distribution. See https://stats.labs.apnic.net/cgi-bin/aspop?c=CA for Canada.
The question I have is why does OVH come #6 with an estimated population of 1,480,927 behind its ASN? Remember these are actual placement of ads. Should I count those users as part of my stats?
As OVH is a data centre, I find that extraordinary if eyeballs were the cost. VPN's may be popular but that seems excessive. Probably bots of some sort, scraping the internet.
I would say VPN - OVH has cheap servers and is quite popular in this industry. There are countries where many active users have to use a sort of VPN to access banned sites.
There are various reasons that might be causing this:
* Lots of VPNs on OVH network
* OVH offers "desktop-as-a-service" and from what I understand it's quite popular
* OVH is also a home ISP - just in France though; but not sure if/how APNIC separated OVH as an ISP and OVH as a server provider.
I think it's all under the same ASN (might be wrong though)
* There are some scrapers on the OVH network - definitely not half a million though
e.g. Teksavvy at 937,855 estimated users. How can they have 937,855 users
if they "only" have 686,848 IPv4 (https://bgp.he.net/AS5645)?
Also, Allstream/Zayo AS15290 has a lot of IPs but it's mostly corps/govs.
So it's a mix of inflated and false positives.
Eric"
Eric
Hi,
There are various reasons that might be causing this:
* Lots of VPNs on OVH network
* OVH offers "desktop-as-a-service" and from what I understand it's
quite popular
* OVH is also a home ISP - just in France though; but not sure if/how
APNIC separated OVH as an ISP and OVH as a server provider.
I think it's all under the same ASN (might be wrong though)
* There are some scrapers on the OVH network - definitely not half a
million though
Let me explain our system in a little more detail.
When we serve an ad we note the origin AS of the Ad. Now we assume (probably wrongly but we have no better data) that the ad’s are smeared evenly across the user population of each country. So we assume that the relative weight of ad placement within an AS is proportionate to the relative number of users in that same country. So if AS 131072 receives 50% of the Ads in a country then we assume that AS131072 holds one half of the number of users of the same country. Thats the first piece of data and the first assumption
The second assumption is that your government is not lying! That means that whatever stats your government lodged with the ITU-T relating to the number of Internet users in your country we believe. (and we actually use the world population data to update these numbers to represent the estimated user population today.)
Mashing the two togeether gives the table per country that you are citing here.
So your question is “:Why is Google delivering 4.57% of the ads in Canada into a network ASN that is the ASN registered against OVH”
OVH is an overlay network, but its certainly clear that it is used by a lot of folk and Google appear to find their users to be an attractive target to ad placement. So we get a high placement count of Ads coming from OVH and we geolocate those users to CA. Maybe there is a geolocation issue and IVH should not be CA. Of there really are a lot of eyeballs behind OVH in Canada.
I wish there was better public data we could use here to generate these numbers.
But there is a dearth of such numbers that are vaguely current relatively inclusive
and not completely stupid.
So we use the ad placement mechanism as an indirect pointer to user count. Its very rough,
and at best one can say that there are large, medium and small eyeball networks, and
to a first order the algorithm appears to identify networks into these three categories.
I am not trying to tie in address density here - I’m not even sure that would be wise
because, as you well know, NATs hide all kinds of sins and virtues.
OVH ISP uses a slightly weird set-up:
- separate AS for residentian IPv4 ranges. That AS is only seen in GRT
via OVH main AS.
- IPv6 is provided from the "main pool", advertised by the main AS.
And yes, their hosting business hosts tons of VPNs (on VPS or dedicated
servers) which are also used by a number of french users in order to get
decent internet performance (for the case when their ISP does saturate
transit - which is every day 17h-24h).