3 ms·

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

by kitteh 7y ago

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.

dylz 7y ago
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.
- kitteh 7y ago
  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.
- yorwba 7y ago
  > I believe Germany is the 'big transit upstream' of Iran. There's a bunch of countries in between, so how does that work?
  - kitteh 7y ago
    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 https://as49666.peeringdb.com to see where they land in eu.
  - dylz 7y ago
    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.

by kitteh 7y ago

dylz 7y ago

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.

kitteh 7y ago
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.
yorwba 7y ago
> I believe Germany is the 'big transit upstream' of Iran. There's a bunch of countries in between, so how does that work?
- kitteh 7y ago
  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 https://as49666.peeringdb.com to see where they land in eu.
- dylz 7y ago
  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.