… updated on Thursday, March 26, 2026 19:36 +0100
MANRS for Enterprise Customers
In October 2023, I was talking about Internet routing security at the DEEP conference in Zadar, Croatia. After explaining the (obvious) challenges and the initiatives aimed at making Internet routing more secure (MANRS), I made my usual recommendation: vote with your wallet. However, if you’re a company in Croatia (or Slovenia, or a number of other countries), you’re stuck.
While ISPs in Croatia might be doing a great job, none of them is a MANRS participant1, so we don’t know how good they are. The situation is not much better in Slovenia; the only ISPs claiming to serve Slovenia are Anexia (a cloud provider) and Go6 Institute, the small network operated by my good friend (and True Believer in IPv6 and MANRS) Jan Žorž. Moving further north, there are decent choices in Austria, and tons of options in Germany or Switzerland. I must be living in a truly thrifty part of Europe.
I’m positive all ISPs in countries with no MANRS participants2 have a wonderful (bullshit) excuse: nobody is asking for MANRS compliance, so why should we spend any time on it – the usual chicken-and-egg approach to security and compliance. No wonder things never move forward.
Anyway, if you do believe in voting with your wallet and making your suppliers uncomfortable, you might want to read the “Internet Routing Supply Chain: An Enterprise’s Most Overlooked Dependency” white paper recently published by MANRS. They correctly identified the potential pressure point (connectivity buyers); the “only” thing left to do is to make enterprise buyers aware of the benefits of MANRS compliance. Maybe it’s time to ask Jan Žorž and his friends (who made RIPE-501/544 pretty successful) for a few hints.
Revision History
- 2026-03-26
- Within 10 days of my complaining about usability issues on the MANRS website, Robert Thomas fixed it. Thanks a million! If only networking vendors would be so responsive…
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When I wrote this blog post, the “MANRS participants” web page was awful as it did not allow you to search for participants serving a particular country. They fixed it in the meantime, and finding MANRS participants in your country is now a breeze. Thanks a million. ↩︎
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At least those that can spell MANRS ↩︎
Coincidentally, someone sent this link today: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/switzerland_bgp_alternative/ But one might want to skip it and go to https://github.com/scionproto/awesome-scion?tab=readme-ov-file#ietf
RFC 1925 rule 5 and 6a
We had multiple sessions with SCION team to consider this for aviation networks. The end result: not a good fit directly.
Indirectly, it could be a telco transport service, a black box, where we only see a normal IP interface. We see a single IP hop and we do not care what is happening in the underlay. Like a dark fiber lambda. However, Ethernet services are more popular from telcos than L3. Since Ethernet service provisioning and activation could be fully automated. L3 services require agreement on a lot of design issues. It is way too complicated compared to Ethernet services. They should study MEF specifications.
However, this is quite an academic approach. They have limited understanding of business realities. The reference to Cisco reply is important. It will be a slow uptake, if ever...