Speed, Silence and Suspicious Traffic

This presentation investigates the proximity to a low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) threshold that can still maintain a tolerable Bit Error Rate (BER) in 100G, 400G and 800G network links.

In 2025, the co.za zone experienced a significant service disruption, followed some months later by a similar failure affecting gov.za. In the absence of a detailed official Root Cause Analysis, limited concrete information has been made available to the operational community regarding these outages.

This talk describes work on an sFlow plugin for VPP (Vector Packet Processing), a popular userspace dataplane, enabling statistical packet sampling at very high rates using the sFlow protocol. In addition to standard packet sampling, dropped packets can also be observed to provide deeper insights into dataplane performance.