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A comment on How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet. Parent comment

Re:How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet by kitteh on Thursday November 21, 2019 @10:24AM (#21594959)
Yep. And most gulf nation's ride someone else's fiber and connect to transit providers in Europe. As someone who deals with routing in the middle East it's very frustrating to deal with westerners who don't understand that there really is isn't much inter country networking out here (just because two points on a map are close don't assume that's how the packets go). Want to go to Bahrain to Oman? You're going thru Europe. Saudi Arabia to UAE? Europe. While UAE is the closest thing to a "hub" where there are well populated IXs, every gulf nation seems to have one big govt backed incumbant carrier who doesn't want to play nicely with outsiders. Also the mixture of internet blocking systems and backhauling of data to centralized scrubbing facilities is also fun.
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Re:How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet by dylz on Thursday November 21, 2019 @10:27AM (#21595008)
I believe Germany is the 'big transit upstream' of Iran.

I haven't found UAE to really be a genuine hub with IXs, it seems like every incumbent ISP/UAE ISP will have 'selective' peering, refuse to be on the routeservers, and refuse to peer with 'outsiders' even if you are on the damn exchange.

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Re:How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet by kitteh on Thursday November 21, 2019 @10:31AM (#21595077)
It's gotten better in the last year. But there are still problems with the locals buying a small ix port and it gets congested. The biggest challenge in the area is the the asymmetry. I could learn the routes if a network in the gulf I want, but they will refuse to accept my prefixes and force the return traffic by Europe unless I pay in some fashion.
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Re:How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet by yorwba on Thursday November 21, 2019 @12:08PM (#21596404)
> I believe Germany is the 'big transit upstream' of Iran.

There's a bunch of countries in between, so how does that work?

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Re:How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet by dylz on Thursday November 21, 2019 @12:45PM (#21596985)
A set of networks, cables, and routers, presumably :)

On my routes to parsonline I see this: dubai -> italy -> france -> germany (ffm) -> iran

The germany to iran leg might be doing mpls or something, I don't see anything in between it other than a lot of timed out hops.

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Re:How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet by kitteh on Thursday November 21, 2019 @12:44PM (#21596973)
Domestic carrier buys optical transport from their country that goes back towards europe. They'll drop some network infra in Europe and buy transit from folks like tata/dtag/telecom Italia.

Check https://as49666.peeringdb.com to see where they land in eu.

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