Why Russia’s “disconnection” from the Internet isn’t amounting to much

Rumors of Russian Internet services degrading have been greatly exaggerated, despite announcements recently from two of the world's biggest backbone providers that they were exiting the country.

The service providers that connect internet service providers in one part of the world with those in another part of the world are referred to as backbone services. Massive amounts of traffic are routed from one internet service provider to another. Russian internet service providers saw the exit of two of their biggest providers. The top internet transit provider to Russia was Lumen. Cogent is one of the biggest Internet backbone carriers in the world.

Still kicking

Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Kentik, said earlier this week that a transit provider disconnected its customers in a country as large as Russia. The move would affect the amount of bandwidth coming into and out of Russia.

The reduction in bandwidth may lead to congestion as the remaining international carriers try to pick up the slack. Russia might be cut off from the global Internet.

Researchers from ThousandEyes said that so far, that hasn't happened. The network metrics show that it continues.

There are many reasons for this. One is that the exit of a single transit provider from a country the size of Russia doesn't have enough of an impact to degrade overall service. As long as the outposts of major Russian internet service providers are not located inside Russia, both Cogent and Lumen will continue to provide transit services to them.

No single transit provider severing ties with Russian internet service providers would achieve such an aim, despite the notion that some US based transit providers would.

The post included images showing that Cogent continues to provide a major route into and out of Russia through its relationship with Russian backbone providers.

The researchers showed how both Cogent and Lumen continue to supply bandwidth thanks to a border gateway protocol announcement by JSC Rostelecom advertising routes from one of its Russian internet service providers.

Russia's connection to the rest of the internet has been speculated about recently. The Russian people still have access to the global Internet at an infrastructure level.

Preventing Russian cyberattacks

Both Cogent and Lumen told CNN on Friday that they were trying to balance the need to prevent their networks from carrying cyberattacks with their convictions for a free and open Internet. The CEO of Cogent told the news network that the company had limited its action to 25 customers in Russia and on Russian networks. Russian businesses that use Cogent's network outside the country through non-Russian state providers are unaffected.

Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer said that the downside of having these connections was that they could be used for offensive purposes.

The rationale for the limited move was similar.

The network was disconnected due to increased security risk in Russia.

The London Internet Exchange is one of the Internet's biggest exchanges for networks around the world to swap or peer to peer traffic. It is not clear how that will affect transit service.

While wholesale traffic going into and out of Russia is currently normal, traffic to select Russian sites from inside and outside the country was spotty. The majority of the disruption came in the form of dropped traffic that often reached a 100 percent loss of packets, which was the result of distributed denial-of-service attacks or attempts by Russian networks to fend off the attacks.

Russian sites have shown evidence of distressed network conditions indicative of attacks, as well as behavior consistent with route filtering, firewalling of traffic, and cloud-based DDoS mitigation, according to company researchers.