Internet services in Antarctica

Mon Jan 20 18:07:08 UTC 2020

It would be really hard to quantify antarctic IPs as actually being from
there. I know some of the people who've operated the geostationary links to
McMurdo and to the pole (inclined orbit satellite visible only part of the
day).

Their WAN links go through geostationary transponder capacity and earth
stations elsewhere on the planet within the same C-band hemispheric beams.
This means that the IPs which Antarctic research stations exit to the
internet from after often part of commercial teleport operators or
university/research groups, indistinguishable from ordinary ARIN or RIPE
blocks assigned to that entity.

For a while a number of links went through a teleport in Florida.

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 2:14 AM Ask Bjørn Hansen <ask at develooper.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a hobby project running DNS service to people looking for NTP
> public servers. I noticed that the DNS servers apparently get ~5 thousand
> queries per day from IPs that the GeoIP database we use claim are in in
> Antarctica. It’s less than 0.0001% of the overall DNS queries, but it made
> me curious what it’d take to make the service work better there.
>
> I imagine the internet service is fragmented between the various stations
> with each being best connected to a particular country? Does anyone have
> contacts there that I could talk to?  I imagine (some of?) the stations
> would have a local NTP service as part of their compute facilities.
>
>
> Ask
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20200120/e971c613/attachment.html>