Internet Society Virtual Peering Series - Central Asia, 6 May 2022

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From YouTube: Virtual Peering Series – Central Asia #5 (ENGLISH)

Description

00:00 Introduction - Vahan Hovsepyan, Community and Public Policy Officer (Caucasus and Central Asia), RIPE NCC
05:08 Internet Resilience in Central Asia - Jelena Cosic and Emile Aben
29:42 Mapping Russia connectivity - Alexander Isavnin, Free University
39:33 Announcement of Central Asia Peering Forum
40:42 Panel: How Recent Events Affected the Internet in Central Asia?
41:31 Talgat Nurlybayev, International IT University
46:44 Vladimir Turekhanov, Kazakhstan Association ofAutomation and Robotics
52:34 Talant Sultanov, ISOC Kyrgyztan
55:29 Vahan Hovsepyan, RIPE NCC
57:16 Alexander Isavnin, Free University
1:03:51 Closing - Vahan Hovsepyan
1:04:44 Max Stucchi, Regional Technical Advisor - Europe, Internet Society
1:07:34 Alex Semenyaka, Community Development Officer – Technical Advisor, RIPE NCC

Landlocked, Central Asian countries have limited options to connect to the Internet. Many have been transiting through Russia and relying on Russian services. With the recent conflict, they are worried about the impact on their own Internet services.

This event will focus on how the Internet is affected in Central Asian countries and what can be done to improve its resilience. Attendees can discuss the availability of alternative fiber paths and the technical, financial, and regulatory barriers to using them. It’s especially important now that local operators actively cooperate in peering with one another—to maintain the best possible national connectivity.

This event is organized by the Internet Society, RIPE NCC, and Euro-IX.

https://www.internetsociety.org/events/virtual-peering-series-central-asia/vpsca-5/

#IXPs #Peering #GrowInternet

A

Hello good morning, dear colleagues, and we like to welcome all our friends and colleagues from all the various regions who are joining in with our um event today, and we have many colleagues with whom we met last year and we've got a new tranche of projects in this region, we're carrying out work in europe, asia and the east, far east, and we're pleased to work with our colleagues from the organizational salt case- and this is the second year when we've been organizing these meetings with central asia, and we welcome you on this basis.

A

Now. I think that the majority of us know that we are workers of sarah cc which operates in central asia, in the caucasus and from amsterdam, and we have various offices and and our colleagues there, I'm the moderator for this session, and I will help you to see what's happening next, we will have our introduction.

A

I will do this in a moment. We have a very interesting presentation from joanna cosit and email abin from the ricc. They are doing a presentation on the internet, resilience in central asia, which is interesting. The various links of the region and the interesting connections with the events happening now and in particular in our region with the recent changes and there'll, also be a small presentation by alexander isabin, who will speak about the mapping of russian connectivity, which is a very interesting presentation, and I think you have questions following from that.

A

Also we'll have a discussion from these events that have been happening in our region, particularly in central asia. Where we have networking. What can we do?

A

How can we deepen these connections and improve the essential infrastructure which are connected with global international forums and we'll have a very good discussion and then we will discuss what will happen next and today we will be speaking about the very great work being done by our colleagues and we'll speak about that trend and the measures that the events are happening in central asia and we grow unknowns.

A

The opportunities for doing this, which could be very interesting for our partners in central asia, particularly in terms of operators of and many associations and industry. Why are we doing this to help to to to develop the internet in the central asian countries? What can we do? Sustainable and and we'll find the very clever ways for developing this system and means of finance for it and all the things we can use to ensure that we have an effective internet system in central asia.

A

It would be difficult to organize these sessions without support from our sponsors, so we give a particularly thanks. Thank you to flex optics, which is the sponsor of this series, and in particular it helps us with translation. We, this is our meta. You all know meta, and this is attempting to make the create the meta universe.

A

Nameks are our colleagues from the roma internet exchange point. Thank you to namex, we're very grateful to them for the assistance they've given us and we'll see the most important thing for our event is we're glad that you are all participating.

A

The most important contribution that can be made to these events is by the organizers and the sponsors. I'm looking forward to hearing you, your enthusiastic questions and your active participation in the question and answer session. Many thanks very pleased to hand over to our colleague, amir abdian from rich assisi and elena. Thank you.

B

Thanks yeah emil, and I will do it together and I will be the first hello everyone. My name is jana and I'm working as a community beyond their for the ripe ncc, I'm based in downgrade serbia, and I work on sporting technical communities in the southeastern europe and what emil- and I have prepared for you today- is a brief introduction to the internet measurement tools that ypmcc has been developing for the last 10 plus years.

B

First, I will tell you a bit about these tools and then emile will show you examples of few different measurements that he created with the data gathered uh by these platforms. Next slide, nope.

C

Yes, there we go.

B

To measure is to improve. Oh, so let me explain uh what we mean by that. So here you can see the picture that we chose to show you it's.

B

It is a city during the night and some parts of it are well lit and others are not, and you can imagine that there are incidents occurring all around the city, but can you guess which of those are going to get detected, reported and ultimately fixed, probably the ones that are easier for us to see and similar to that logic when it comes to incidents and issues on the internet? But the conclusion here is that you cannot fix what you cannot see.

B

Network operators do have at their disposal a number of zones that they can use to observe the traffic in their own network, but that visibility is limited because you cannot see what's happening outside your network, for example, in your transit network and using tools like right, pathless or risk allows you to see more and observing the internet close to you will help you improve your network.

B

So let's go into the tools. The first one is rip athletes. So briefly, atlas is a global platform for active internet measurements. It was developed with a goal of achieving better insights and into internet connectivity and reachability around the world in real time. More specifically, we were curious to see how the packets flow and what latencies do we see.

B

The platform is run by volunteers in our community and all the data gathered by measurements is publicly available practically. This is a large network of rather small devices called probes and anchors that you can see.

B

Pictures on the slides probes are smaller on the left and they can do measurements towards other systems, while anchors are bigger machines that have the option of running measurements from, but also into them, probes come ready to use so plug and play, and they there are over 11 000 of them worldwide, but, as you can, as you can also see on the map, they are unevenly distributed around the globe and most of them are being deployed in the western parts of the world.

B

Europe and the us, but technical people might be glad to hear that we also have software probes, which do require a bit of skill to install and run but solve a lot of logistical issues that might arise with hardware probes.

B

But once the probe is connected to your network, it constantly performs a set of built-in measurements, so ping trace route, dns queries to the root name, servers and limited http measurements.

B

It doesn't look at the traffic or content, so ncc collects data produced by all these probes and provides internet maps tools and all sorts of visualizations based on the aggregated results. And if you host a probe or anchor, you can also run customized measurements to gain valuable information about irritability into your own network.

B

Next tool is which stands for routing information service, and this is another community project that nc has been supporting for a really long time. It is a routing data collection platform that consists of globally distributed set of remote route collectors, who are typically located at the internet exchange points. But we also have multi-hop collectors, and I will talk later about them in more detail, and these collectors collect and store internet routing data.

B

So volunteers, peer with with the collectors using the bjp protocol and restores the updates and we draw messages, and there are a number of tools that use there is data.

B

Some of them are our ripe stat and some are external tools like pgp.ag.net or bgp tools, internet health report or bgp alerter, and this data can be very useful because it provides valuable, up-to-date information on things like what is being announced or which prefixes are seen and where or which are not seen, and what routes are available and so on. There's also a map, and it shows what it shows are is that red circles are the locations of our route collectors and the green dots are the piers that are feeding into our multi-hop collectors.

B

Yes, and one of the main problems of the internet routing system is that it doesn't provide a built-in security mechanism and a good way to increase the security is to provide better visibility into it that will lower the risk of routing incidents. Like bgp hijacks, I hope I wasn't speaking too fast for the translator, and now that I introduced the platforms.

B

I won't give the floor tim mill, who will who has a couple of examples of how we use these tools for analysis and later I will come back to tell you how, with your help, we can make them even better so emil.

C

You thank you, elena yeah. I will show a couple of examples of measurements: analysis that we did and how they relate to the resilience of the internet. First one and I we need to move people out of the way in my screen, so I can actually see what's on screen. So first one. This was january. This year, kazakhstan there were outages reported there, and because we have these probes, these little devices in kazakhstan deployed there by volunteers. In in kazakhstan, we actually have some insight into what is what was actually going on.

C

So what you see here is a graph that, on the y-axis shows the number of connected probes and on on the x-axis has time, so you can actually see patterns of probes connecting and disconnecting at the same time in in various patterns, and what you can also see here is we divided this up into infrastructure growth? So that's these write up as anchors they're, typically deployed near infrastructure and other probes that we could identify as being routing infrastructure or close to them, and they are in red.

C

That's the red line and the gray is the the all the other probes. So that's probes installed in offices in homes, so you can see different types of connectivity going on in kazakhstan as the events unfolded and you actually see various diurnal patterns so daily up and downs there we wrote a write labs. Article write labs is our platform for uh showing these analyses and it's also available for our community.

C

So for you, if you have interesting things to write about your internet, we have a platform for that and we also made this visualization available as an open source tool. If you go to that link there, you can for any country that has wiped us probes. You can actually see how the probes go up and down. You can also do that for autonomous system, so per network or per legion.

C

So it's a very versatile tool to actually see what's going on in a particular geographic area with regards to internet connectivity- and this is a very basic signal that shows this and now on to my second example- and I think alexander will talk in more depth about this particular thing, which is the connectivity of russia, the connectivity to the wider internet of russian networks, russian end users- and here we use ripe risk data, routing data, the btp data, to paint a picture of how russia is connected to the wider internet, and the background of that is because of the war in ukraine and sanctions that various companies said they would impose onto russian companies.

C

We wanted to analyze what actually was happening on the internet and we detailed that in another write labs article. So it's on labs.net at the url. That's on this on this slide, and I just wanted to briefly explain this picture. What you see here is routing data, so this is. Each line is a connection that we see in vcp, and the dots are russian networks and networks connected to russian networks.

C

The russian networks are called red and we've colored the the tier one networks. We call them green. So these are what you would consider the core of the internet and the size of the notes. The size of the dots is relative to how many end users how many people are actually connected via that network, and that could mean both connected directly via that network, but also indirectly, for instance, as an example level.

C

Three, which is a is the green dot here that has is bigger than the small dots, because it provides connectivity, for instance, lost telecom and other big russian networks, so it also has influence over how russia connects to the wider internet. I didn't explain the blue dots. The blue dots are all the other networks that the russian networks are connected to and you can actually see there is a lot of connectivity as that we can see in our our routing data that that we collect- and I hope alexander can later on, show some more.

C

I think I I saw some really nice fiber data from him in a previous call. So I hope that would augment this. A third wait: no I'm not at this third example. Yet, of course, this is the central age appearing form, so we also made graphs for the central asia countries with using the same methodology, because the graphing, the colors, are a little bit different, but I just want briefly want to show you all five countries that we analyzed.

C

This is kyrgyzstan, there's probably familiar names here in in purple for the kyrgyzstan people and the kyrgyzstan networks, and you see a lot of russian networks. They depend on to get to the wider internet, and also hurricane with an american company.

C

Here is kazakhstan it's basically a similar picture telecom is very central there, which means that it has many kazakhstan users as well. It's also an upstream for many kazakhstan networks that have users. This is tajikistan. Tajik telecom is very large and again russian networks here, and one thing I found interesting here is actually I've heard about the the digital silk growth and connectivity into china, but to the extent that we collect data, we have not seen very many signals of this happening, at least not in in this type of visualization, that we do.

C

Here's the community for turkmenistan, so turmeric telecom is very large there and again the colors are a bit changed so now the tier one support the internet is orange here, but what's interesting here is that, apart from connectivity via ros telecom, there's all that also a very large dependency on delta telecom. This, which is an azeri network.

C

And if you look at cable maps, you can actually also see that there's a cable across the caspian sea, from turkmenistan and towards azerbaijan and the last one here is uzbekistan, and that has a very similar picture as the first three. So that was my second example and having uh of course having multiple having a variety of options for your international connectivity increases your reliance, because if one of these parties goes away or has a problem, the others can fill in for that.

C

Let's put it that way, and the last example that I want to show is actually this is not the central asia region. It's a bit further west. It's the situation in ukraine and with the invasion going on there. I was actually surprised by how resilient the local internet there was and we started looking into.

C

Why is that- and I have a colleague alex who already in 2019, gave a very good presentation on why the internet is there the way it is, and so we authored another lapse, article about the resilience there and what we can learn from it. The factors that we identified is there's a low market concentration, so there's not a big monopoly player in the end user market there's there are many internet exchange points which helps in having diversity in connectivity.

C

There are many physical fiber paths which helps- and this is a very important and maybe under uh stress factor- is the humans. There's human connections there's a lot of dedication, courage and perseverance in trying to keep the network going there, and that's exemplified by by this picture where, in the mid, amidst all of the bubble and destruction, an engineer is splashing at fiber or is working on getting fiber working again.

C

So to stress this, this one of the points a little bit uh more is there's a visualization here of how the end user networks in ukraine are interconnected, and this is using alright atlas platform.

C

But you can see on the outside that the arch of this visualization is the the the number of users in each or the percentage of user in each network, and we only visualized all of the networks that have over one percent of users and as you can see, 55 of this arc is missing, which basically means that for 55 percent of the market is served by isps that have less than one percent of the market.

C

So that's very diffused, there's no, no big monopoly player and actually in economics, there's an indicator called the h I and the I stands for index and that number goes from zero to one. One is the monopoly, and ukraine has one of the lowest numbers there in the world, which means it's very low concentration, and you also see connectivity like aligns in this visualization going to two central nodes there.

C

These are the exchange points, and here you can also already see how exchange points play a vital role in the in the internet in ukraine, and we actually made this by using these ripe applause probes and to do a mesh measurement between the the end user networks and then just seeing if the ixps are in these path or not, and another example of that type of measurement is a visualization. We have about. The internet exchange points the ixps.

C

If we look at peering db, which is a database where you can register ixps and networks, and I would encourage everybody to register their network because your network becomes discoverable that way. Hearing db has 19 ixps in ukraine, and 13 of them are visible between the the 200 probes that we have in ukraine and that's uh a lot, and so what we actually do is do again do mesh measurements. So these are technically.

C

These are called trace routes and we just look at the if we see peering lands for for any of these ixps and there's not only a lot of the connectivity between these probes sees at least one ixp. What you can also see in the picture is there's a lot of different colors, which means that there's a lot of different ixps in the particular territory.

C

So there's not a single dominant ixp, and you there's also very there's a lot of different options for connectivity and that helps in resilience.

C

So that was the part that I had prepared, and I hope this contributes to to discussions about resilience of the internet in central asia. But now I want to give it back to elena for a couple of asks and the end of the takeaways yeah.

B

Thanks how can help us improve these tools? First, you can help us improve risks by shining the light on the structure of the internet in your country and on the slide, you can see a chart uh that shows the an average as path path, length between risk and prefixes in your region.

B

So for y-axis you can see that it shows the average distance per country, so the number of aes hops that we need to go through to reach you to reach those prefixes and those countries that are circled are the five central asian countries, and you can see that tajikistan is four a.s hops away from us, and other countries are most of them are grouped between 2.5 and 3 hops, so this number could be much could be lower and because bgp is information hiding protocol and on every as hop it will only forward the best path.

B

This will hide the number of routes that we can see and it will obscure the full topology of the network of the country, and what we want to do is to bring those prefixes closer to us so that we can have a better network.

B

Observability, which would make the analysis that we can do about the country more accurate and, for example, for tajikistan, we would need a network from the country to establish a bgp peering session with one of our multi-hub collectors, and if some of you are network operators in central asia who are able to do this, or maybe somebody else who is and are able to convince them, and that peering with risks is good for the country please reach out to us, we will leave our contact details at the end of the presentation when it comes to next slide when it comes to atlas, as I mentioned before, there is this huge discrepancy of number of probes in europe and outside of europe, and when it comes to geographical coverage, we can see on the map that some countries in central asia are have a pretty decent coverage, for example kazakhstan- and this allowed us to do very interesting measurements, like the ones that mentioned earlier.

B

Other countries like turkmenistan at the moment do not have an active probe and, of course, this is something that we would like to see changing another way of looking at. It is percentage of the population that is in a network which has at least one atlas probe, and here we see a slightly different results than on this previous slide.

B

Where, for example, tajikistan has nine active probes in the country out of which two probes are in networks that serve about 56 percent of the population and in the appendix we included the breakdown of every central asia country where you can see which exact network does host the probe and which ones don't do it yet, and we would love to see more probes being deployed to central asian countries, and we know that there is an interest from the community to host them.

B

So we are in contact with few people who have a role of atlas ambassadors, which means that they receive a number of probes hardware, probes that they can distribute to the community they shared with us. There are certain difficulties when it comes to importing the equipment.

B

So please, let us know if there are other ways for us to get those probes in and also keep in mind that software probes are also a viable option for you. So next slide. So both risks and others are open platforms run by with the help of the community and for the purpose of supporting the community, and you can help us to increase the quality of the data that we collect, increasing the observability and making the internet better. First for your network, second for your country and last for the whole internet.

B

And if you have any questions we are here and we are, we will be glad to answer them.

D

Thank you now. Thank you. Thank you. We already have some feedback in chat, so our talent has mentioned that they can host the prop. So the kirby stand turns from yellow to green, and that's a great great activity will, uh of course, contact you and yeah, and here's also and I'll give you that opportunity. Thank you, alexander.

A

Has switched in we're very grateful to him. Let's have an exchange of opinions. Our discussion time will come later. There are two questions which have been raised. The first and tala tesla has asked.

E

Thanks so much just a quick comment, a suggestion for emily and elena. Maybe we could find the collaboration with the itu unisa initiative called giga, where they're connecting all the schools in the world to the internet.

E

Perhaps somehow we could incorporate atlas pro effort with the giga and there will be more probes in the region, at least so that was just an idea. I'd like to share yeah.

A

Thank you, talent. We discussed this question it's a very interesting initiative. Perhaps we could try once again to see what we can do to help with some resources, but we should be able to do something within the framework of this project and once again, we'll discuss with the elena and our comrades friends.

A

Let's now move over to our presentation, if you don't object by alexander isian, with his short presentation on russian connectivity data connectivity in russia and neighboring countries, this will be a very brief introduction to the subject and therefore I'll simply show you some um pictures I'll give you a general picture. I'd like to shed some light on the the title of the presentation.

A

I would like to speak about the proximity of the borders of russia to central asia, and we, of course, are unambiguously interested in discussing this subject and I'll. Let you see what's on the screen, we have a great deal of open data in russia in including information on licenses for building.

A

Yes, so here's what's happening and in the russian federation, with open data, we've produced this map and you can see the places where there's a chance to cross the border into central asia. There are only a few places, and these clearly mainly in the in kazakhstan, there is one from omsk to and orienburg.

A

We have only a few crossing points for cables across borders and there are a number of places where this happens: the the several cables which cross the border. Basically, they run parallel with the electricity lines or railway lines, and mainly these cables belong to companies which have the necessary infrastructure.

A

The distance from western europe is huge and therefore to build this infrastructure. You need very substantial investments and, in fact, in addition to speaking about the changing situation there, we can see where, on the border with the ukraine, the basic crossing points occur. They were in the region of belgrade and kharkov.

A

This happened for historical reasons, and russia began to develop towards finland and sweden for the mass market, but there was also points in harkevin belgrade, so cables are built where they have permission which can be rather complicated to achieve, and so in the belgae of harkov area. This was one of the first lines which is available for commercial customers, so here there's traffic, which went from russia and then and on to central asia and then to the north of peterborough and harker. So we see in in russia a number of delays hold back holdups.

A

So the main thing is the licenses for construction, where you have to do construction, work or install cables and now for the internet. You have had that.

A

You need community accountability for cables, and this accountability has to be shown with the the users so such as the owners of the fiber optic cables and the capacity of these cables. The data isn't always opened. In addition, the infrastructure which we look at we see in central asia. Here we have the marketing framework taken from an item in print the roughly 20 companies which have inter-regional links and links with central asia.

A

You can see that, although there are many cables in russia, the main lines belong to ross tilikum and which is building is in many cases several lines go from one cable again, the distances are enormous and there are serious pressures on this, particularly in the eastern section of the for access from the russian federation to lines connection lines. So here we see on this map the connections with kazakhstan.

A

This is mainly marketing material, but you can see in this.

F

Also, some companies provides information on what's about their own network, so this is a map of every tn company which originally was russian company and it is independent, so it doesn't belong to major operators across telecom and they're, showing their map going through central asia they're actively building their own fibers they're losing wavelengths, and we see how they cables going through central asia than to china and to eastern asia.

F

Unlike china, as we see now, they have point of presence in central asia when you can buy layer free connectivity, but you see they are not going to uzbekistan and turkmenistan.

F

I think that this cable is a part of international projects which are actually a united project. You joi joined by tier one operators or european operators, but we usually see marketing materials but know much about building their connectivity, physical connectivity or availability of losing wavelength or layer to connectivity. So you see compared maybe to even european european network that central asian and russian networks going to the eastern parts of russia are not very developed, like any other networks of this kind, and maybe my last uh slide.

F

I also mapped connectivity of innova, for you know, meetings I think, last year or previously, it's old enough picture. So in these pictures we see in no countries except ukraine and russia, because well it's very difficult to map a lot of factors. Two thousand iss or two more than two thousand closer to three thousand autonomous system numbers in ukraine.

F

More than five thousands in russia, so uh picture will be unreadable, so I mapped only other countries and their borders with which their connects to, and we see that there is no not much connectivity going, not through russia or russia and being here we see belarus with exact one connective, major connectivity.

F

We see moldova, we see source caucuses with jo with armenia, george uh and azerbaijan, connected together through russia and others, and we see central asia where kazakhstan and kyrgyzstan very well interconnected while uzbekistan tajikistan connected not very well. So I hoped that that could be studied. If this is virtual appearing series in central asia, we can prepare more detailed, not just uh layer, three studies, so this picture is built from root, collector data which I mean previously shown, but we also could study economical impacts and others. Thank you very much.

F

I think we will be able to talk about russian connectivity separately and maybe it worth it the definitive event which we are gonna tell and discuss what's happening during war times so, but in this case we have to be very accurate in what we saw. Well, we see that internet in resilient and the people restoring inactively and the government tries to interact with internet regulation, especially in war times, so I think it need to be studied uh separately.

F

A

Thank you alexander I'd like to add that alexander recently was on our platform. Claps. You can give him ask questions short questions to alexander and we can also deal with it in the discussion, but I think if there are me there are hello good day, hello alexander. I have a short question: where do the routing channels go from as a beginner without channels at all? No there's a reasonable number of channels. All the telephone operators are there.

A

I I just didn't see. If you don't mind, we will return to the discussion of geography during during the this session. I also added a reference to an emuls article which shows russia and the internet, and it's there are very a large number of articles.

A

So thank you, but before we move on to our discussion or the participants in our discussion, are our colleagues from central asia to golobia we and our various other colleagues sata aziza, so everyone will be there. Everyone will have their questions so before we go on to that part of the discussion.

A

I'd like to inform you that we can share the references for this session, but with our colleagues today we can announce the beginning of receiving applications for taking up this enterprise central asia forum. It will be take place in the fourth quarter and in kazakhstan.

A

We are preparing for this and we're planning to have events in uzbekistan as well. It.

G

Will be a central asia appearing forum and it will be a major event in central asia and we are going to connect with main nodes and if you would like to host it or participate in it, please do address us. The email address is available and also I will put into chat the description of the event and email address, and now I would like uh to our unmute their microphones and to discuss what are the possibilities.

G

What are the opportunities and what influence on central asian internet had the latest events and what are the future consequences? If we do not use it, we can outline at least to minimize the damage so talgat. Let's talk about the main speakers and then our colleagues of our participants will take places take part as well good day. Dear colleagues,.

A

I would like to welcome everyone, dear welcoming students, on our behalf. Yes, of course, yes, I recently gave an interview to radio liberty. With our colleagues know. We have a regional station radio liberty and I was given interview there about the latest actions of the russia's aggression, and this causes problems for the internet. Of course, we ask people to avoid making political judgments as part of our housekeeping rules are. For me, that's fine.

A

I won't mention any more politics, but we have a tier one provider lewin and the second one I can't remember, and they have equipment for a russian provider, and the situation of course has deteriorated.

A

The position of the russian internet has has definitely become worse and, as alexander said, we can see that there are not many tunnels to central asia, as the situation is becoming worse and worse, that other providers will take over from russia for the internet. And I've spoken about this for a long time to my colleagues.

A

They said this. It's nonsense, but there's for 14 years there's been a law in russia about the internet, and there are articles which say that, under certain conditions, russian providers can therefore in central asia, and kazakhstan alexander demonstrated this very clearly in central asia, apart from turkmenistan, which is a special case and because it has access to the caspian sea. But this doesn't affect our situation very seriously.

A

Therefore, the question that stands before us in kazakhstan, in the first instance, is which internet paths can we have is it to azerbaijan or to turkey, and I think this question has to be looked at in all aspects at all levels and I'll give a reference to radio liberty, and I think that our central asian colleagues also and public organizations we have to make ways of installing these routes.

G

So, first of all, yes, the we should unite the efforts of all central asian countries and to address international organizations to for the european uh community to help us to make this obvious to kazakhstan government, because it's the problem of national security.

G

We need to have our own roots of internet. That would be not through russia without political context, this alternative route could be gp or we improve connectivity and effectivity of internet, and even if the conflict is over, then to have this channel is of utmost important for the country. This is my point of view and this question should be raised at all levels and the pressure should be exercised both in the country and outside the country from the from abroad.

G

They could send a letter to the ministry, relevant ministry and help us with the issue, and this is the issue that we cannot put aside and we have to exercise pressure on the government also. I would like uh to say thank you emil to alexander and elena for their very interesting presentations.

G

We have, I have different ideas about measurements, but I'm going to write about them to out with our conference. This is a technical issue. Thank you for your attention, and now I would like to mention my article. The interview I give is about internet connectivity.

G

A

Thank you. If we leave political um events aside, the idea is that we have to diversify the channels, and so let's look at what other other speakers and participants have to say good day. Dear colleagues, thank you for inviting me to take part in this event, and thank you also to elena and alexander for their presentations.

A

There are many interesting things which I've found out, but every time I find out something new in these presentations and it's very important for us in kazakhstan. So thank you very much for giving me the the chance to speak. I would like to say that I'm not quite in agreement with what talgan said, but connecting kazakhstan with other countries, since we already have connections with the russian federation and with china, I don't have anything against alternative routes.

A

The it's important to have connections for a reliable system when operators from two countries uh connect with each other. This does not mean that the russian federation would decide to cut itself off for the kazakhstan internet, there's a possibility for transit traffic to come. So I think that there is a risk, but it's not maybe as high as talgat seem to suggest.

A

As far as the network operations are concerned.

A

In these extraordinary conditions, I would like to say that in kazakhstan the connections stopped operating abruptly in january of this year and the internet stopped working, not just externally, but within the country as well, and connectivity was lost with a significant part of the network with ttp dns, and it wasn't able we weren't able to connect it up again immediately.

A

So our association, the other associations, have proposed to the appropriate government bodies that they should not divide the connectivity of a civil system. Do we encounter problems with information, cooperation and interaction, but this affects the operations of enterprises which make great use of the internet. It's important parts of their functions.

A

There are instances where we don't have the complete switch off of the internet, but in principle we'll see what consequences there are in future and that we can comment on this.

G

It would be strange because russia's attitude to central asia is not a very polite, they take away the cable and they do not think about the consequences.

G

So we had to use azerbaijan and turkish channels to re-route the traffic, as the practice shows the relationship between kazakhstan and central asia with russia. Our northern neighbor is not very good dealing with our problems. These comments from vladimir about the virtual telecommerce.

G

It is ridiculous and let us take find out the technical aspects and avoid their political political attitude. Let's try to minimize them. If there was a comment, I'm glad that I uh made some god happy but uh never mind. I uh would like uh not about virtual channels.

G

Maybe talgat should get a deeper understanding of how the connection works and it's not unnecessary, not necessary to do it. The way it all got things it could be done in other. As regards of the others, I will yes remain silent. I have a comment just a short comment. I worked on kazakh and it was a main route and as records the traffic through china.

G

At the moment, 99 95 percent of traffic goes through russia and it is good if five percent goes through china uh gazpachin, uh mr turikana, let's not argue, I am a lecturer. I am active as csnp and I worked with major providers in kazakhstan. So, let's not argue. Thank you. Thank you very much for your comments. Thank you, vladimir for your moderation on we have alexandre savin, but also aziz.

G

I'm quite happy. Let me be a fourth. I will have my comment later talon. Thank you. Maybe I will add one more direction, which is very important.

G

It is we have to look at the example of afghanistan and where the government politics was established, that there should be several connectivity points and through iran on pakistan and as regards the influence of digital information. We have a project we want to connect the rural areas. Distant rural areas to internet and engineers say that it is very expensive in terms of plant in current situation.

G

The next direction unpredictable is digital economy. It is platforms which are popular different platforms. We are not clear how they are going to work, but the local platforms are being developed like, for example, kiermer kg and the through care market g. We use, for example, not only pizza, but also a live cow, and someone from italy ordered a cow together with delivery from kurdistan.

G

An interesting situation. We are also depend on russian language, and the content is a big question we have to develop. The content is called scenarios on the digital citizen, where we plan to do it in english and in russian uh digital skills is a very important direction. Is one more and creative industry within our countries. They are preparing materials in different language languages, for example the billions company and my children are singing their soul, and this song got enormous amount of things.

G

And, finally, I would to say that cyber security is very important and we are working on a regional initiative, technical society. This is the protection of a civil society. Private users and the civil sector needs help. We would like to provide. Thank you very much express.

A

Thank you talent, before we pass over to alexander about the opportunities for developing activities. Talent already spoke about the digital market, even turkmenistan, which has very few atlas probes connections with iran, with azerbaijan, with kazakhstan with uzbekistan.

A

So there are opportunities here for working with kazakhstan, we'll see how it turns out, but for uzbekistan through turkmenistan and iran, and even through europe, there are lots of possibilities.

A

There is also an initiative which is entitled in this cup within which there are regional projects for not only for fiber optic but for server resources which depend on the general fiber optics system.

A

So we can work actively in in that area. Alex has just shown a link to a document with participation of hosts in central asia. So if you go there, you find it's very interesting that there are all the contacts shown.

A

So if you're interested in this alexander has shown yet another picture.

G

I wanted uh to talk about it myself, because now really is the central asian countries are not only land blocked countries, they are also sanction-locked countries, and this uh story are that they have iran with good connectivity with persian gulf, but connectivity with russia and the third aside is china, so they have the pressure from all ends, so maybe international politics should provide some help.

G

Let's not talk about politics, and next max will tell us that my time is over, and so politics really to call what is a happening. War is risky only for myself and I happy to see alex simenyaka and guden just now. God is saying that russia can just switch off central asia.

G

It's really really a truth, not only for you, but also to citizens of russia to people of russia. We, I would like to tell countries that we have a pressure in central asia in bl, russia, political atmosphere, that's why the businesses are not developing infrastructure.

G

Internet infrastructure is not developing very well, they didn't have pressure in ukraine and they had excellent development of infrastructure, which is resilient during the war lots of things in there, and it is easy to repair the roots. Main routes from russia are from ukraine, through ukraine and through north scandinavian countries, not through biella russia, because bl russia built telecom. Their conditions are not very good, but here we have an independent operator in ukraine, and so uh we that's why we are talking about this silk route.

G

If there is no possibilities for development for development, buildness to economy, the free economic freedom, central asia is very seriously remote. They have borders with china with afghanistan.

G

Afghanistan has a mountains, regions on the border and if independent countries will start building a cable, what did the independent countries before it will be very expensive project impossible without international help? I soak helps to build uh community networks. uh These are wonderful efforts, but they are comparatively small. We have meta.

G

Meda is building cables through asia, use balloons and so on. Don't know if we have any representatives from meta, but I think that there should be a big conglomeration of companies that would help to develop infrastructure in essential countries go through iran, which will have less sanctions through turkey and azerbaijan.

G

Georgia from here you have to overcome geographical issues, because otherwise the unification might not happen. If you look at the map that retina goes through china on the second tier and they do not have a protocol, traffic in to china is much more expensive than in europe. What affects russia in terms of war with ukraine is many russian european operators of the second tier and then connected in ukraine. They connected to global operators, in other words, from tier one, on two and level three reached it as well.

G

Just a very few nodes of our third tier were connected in ukraine, and these are seriously affected the connectivity together with internet society.

G

We are trying to look at technology, so this is the graph between russian and european, as in spite of the hostilities with damages to cable, in spite of the fact that that ukrainian regulator decided to switch off these european european exchange links were not interrupted at any time. It was uh slow, it was lowered, but the infrastructure restores itself and there is hope for our central asian colleagues if they take infrastructure of second level through russia, and it will not be easy because uh ros telecontras telecom would not like it because they would suppress competitors.

G

I do not understand it, but it's the case. So we have to direct our efforts to exactly this area, and existing situation will allow central asian uh operators improve their connectivity by all possible ways, not only the five boring countries, but many more.

A

Thank you alexander.

A

Thank you precisely because you've dealt with the question and we've looked at various peering forums in the fourth quarter. But I'd just like to say to finish off. I have information to show the tradition in virtual peering forms is for to conduct each meeting for the central asian forum. We.

H

A

That's four times in the sea this year, we've as part of this series and I'd like to point out that sponsors have helped us organize. These meetings, give max an open to welcome them and uh give his opinion on this matter.

H

Thank you mahan and thank you everyone for participating today. As vahan said, we've been organizing, together with ripen cc and and together with euro ix, these events in order to bring more content, to bring more knowledge about the peering ecosystem in central asia.

H

Now one thing that we have in a way not done yet is to ask participants for presentations to make an open call for presentations, and I think this is going to be important as we evolve from an event that we started with the hope of bringing more knowledge about connectivity about interconnection to a more interesting community. That interacts and discusses these issues.

H

This event, number five was organized as a discussion on connectivity matters in the region, because we received, as internet society, request from target, for example, but we would like to ask you if you have in the next days in the next week, if you have any suggestions for topics, but also it's been more, especially if you have a suggestion on like presentations that you would like to give. If you have anything in mind, we are we're always interested in having someone from the region present.

H

We can bring content, as you could see, with rypncc with emil and yelena who I really thank you for their presentation.

H

I thank again alexander for also he's very good insight into how connectivity is around russia and in the surrounding regions, but we are always interested in more content and we're going to have another event at the end of may.

H

So, if you have any suggestion on a presentation or on a topic, let us know, and I'm going to write my email address in the chat in a moment and vahan is going to write his email address as well and we're looking forward to to get your suggestions or your presentations soon. So thank you very much.

A

Thank you max. You can be sure that if anyone answers your letter, we work together, so you can send it to whoever you like max me other con other colleagues in the organization.

A

So it doesn't matter who you send your communications to. We will draw you into our next event. Just before we finish, I would like to say to alex simiaki we've had a very good discussion and I'd like to point out that we meet online. It's not a personal meeting and it's somewhere between traditional encounters and discussions by email, but we have a traditions and.

G

We have traditional mailing lists in the ipcc and others, and the first of all the mail list of ripe, where we discuss all topics which are actual for a specific region and we you do not need any special membership or anything.

G

You uh can take part in discussion and we haven't finalized the topics that we mentioned today they should be developed, are they could be forgotten or omitted? And, yes, we could have said something which should be continued in our communication.

G

It's a mechanism that worked for years and I do hope that the next event will be we'll have lively discussion and we will not repeat what we've already discussed, but we will move uh forward on to the topics and we'll see the results. That would be great if we could see the results and if someone gets any movements, any kind of a glimpse of movement, please do not tell us and even five minutes. I would be important if you could share your experience.

G

Please do declare it. Please write us. Thank you. Thank you very.

A

Much I'd like to express my gratitude to the speakers and the participants in our discussion and I'd like to also pass on our gratitude to our colleagues who you didn't hear but who were present and took an active part in the um sessions, but max, of course, would like to thank our interpreters and from euro eggs and for all the technical help that we've received. So thank you to everyone and we will meet for our next event.

A

When will that be max? That's before may the 1st we'll receive applications for the forum on central asia, which we don't know where. Yet thank you to everyone. Thank you to our interpreters. Thank you for those for the lively discussion and until we meet.