www.gov.ps - offline?

Mon Apr 8 21:35:38 UTC 2002

On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote:
> Looks like www.gov.ps is offline. Wasn't someone in Norway operating a
> backup site for this? IP address resoves to 212.14.253.243 which is not
> routed at this time.

Doing a little research, it appears a substantial part of physical
facilities used by PalTel (the Palestine Telecommunications Company)
are still inter-twined with Bezeq (the incumbent Israeli telephone
company).  All the communication links I found seem to transit
an Israel at some point.  A few official networks registered to
the Palestine Authority are offline (gov.ps). Most of the research
and education networks registered to Palestinian institutions are
operating. Several commercial Palestinian ISPs are still reachable.

There seems to be a lot of wireless activity in the region, at least
among the ISPs still operating.  Neither the Palestinian nor Israeli
telecommunication companies seem very happy about ISPs using wireless
though.

I haven't been able to discover if this is a political problem or
a technical problem.  Consider the US Department of Interior has
been operating under a court order for four months.