International ISPs in the Middle East
An ISP(Internet service providers) is a company that provides individuals and other companies access to the internet.An ISP has the equipment to provide internet to a specific geographic area. The larger ISPs have their own infrastructure so that they are less dependent on the telecommunication providers and can provide better service to their customers. However, there are 3 levels of ISPs. Tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 providers.
Tier 1 providers or backbone provider, exchange Internet traffic with other tier 1 providers via peering , or with other internet providers via transit.Without these providers there wouldn’t be traffic exchange between continents.
Tier 2 on the other hand are service providers which connect between tier 1 and tier 3 providers.
Finaly Tier 3 ISP are providers that purchase internet transit and redistribute to their clients.
In this project we are going to analyse the international ISPs for the MENOG region.All the measurements are being extracted from RIPE stat,for this study the data of the current time is being extracted by using the Request.get method witch is a simple HTTP request.
After the request the data is saved as json format. Json parsing will be the solution for using the information measured.
Figure 1 shows a pie chart of the international transit providers of Lebanon in 2018. As we can see there are 3 major providers in lebanon:Level 3,Tata Communication,STORMSYSTEM.These backbone providers will connect Lebanon to the world.We realise that more than 62% of lebanon is covered by Level 3 and one of the reasons of this dependency,could be the very attractive deal between the lebansses ISP and Level 3. However this pourcentage isn’t as good as its looks like because there is no redundancy in the lebaneese network.
Figure 1
The table below shows the evolution of the International Providers of Lebanon from 2008 to 2018.
| International Transit Providers in Lebanon | International Transit Providers in Lebanon |
|---|---|
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As we can see, the providers and their coverage changes every year. However some of them are still playing since 2008 a very important role in the connection of Lebanon with the world,like level 3.This backbone provider has been covering from 15 to 30% of Lebanon since 2010.
On the other hand some of the International providers like BTT reduced their coverage in lebanon.While they covered more than 33% of lebanon in 2008, this pourcentage dropped to 16% in 2009.The attractive deals with other providers might explain this drop .After 2013 BTN, which was a very important provider for Lebanon, became part of the providers with less than 4% of coverage .However years go by and new International providers aren’t connecting lebanon to their networks.
After viewing the different International providers for Lebanon, we are going to see if the same providers cover other countries in the MENOG region.
Let’s compare the International providers of Lebanon with those of the arab emirates:
| International Transit Providers in Lebanon | International Transit Providers in AE |
|---|---|
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The two pie charts illustrate the propotion of International providers in Lebanon and Arab Emirate in 2018.
Level 3 provide 62% of Internet in Lebanon and only 10.1% in AE.The maximum propotion of providers that provide Internet in the AE is 15.4%(GTT-Backbone).So we can say that there is equal distribution of providers in AE and a dominance distribution in Lebanon.
Let’s focus now on the Satellite providers of Lebanon,we can notice that the Level 3 isn’t the dominant provider anymore.This could mean that Level 3 provides Lebanon via fiber optics at most. We can also see that StormSystem is the major Satellite provider of Lebanon. We notice also that all the providers who are part of the Category “Others” are Satellite providers.
This result is the evidence that there is redundant connectivity in Lebanon,if the connection via Fiber Optics went down there is always a backup Satellite provider who can connect us to the world.