Marhaba Beirut! Cloudflare’s 121st location



	February 15, 2018

Quoting: Cloudflare

Lebanon is a historic country, home to two cities among the oldest in the world. There’s a vast mix of influences from the East and West. It’s also the smallest country in continental Asia.

Lebanon’s connection to the Internet

Lebanon is a little different to most other countries when it comes to the internet, with all connectivity to the outside world flowing via a single network, Ogero. Traffic to Lebanon was previously served from our existing deployments in Marseille and Paris, due to where Ogero connects to the rest of the internet. By deploying locally in Beirut, round-trip latency is cut by around 50 milliseconds. This might seem like almost nothing, but it adds up when you factor in a DNS lookup and 3-way handshake required to open a TCP connection. Internet penetration in Lebanon according to different sources is around 75%, which is quite high. However, the speed available to end users is low, typically in single digit megabits per second.

The Ministry of Telecommunications has an ambitious plan to improve the connectivity available in Lebanon by 2020, a big part of this involves deploying fiber optic cabling to homes and businesses throughout the country. This will inevitably help to boost the level of traffic we see today coming from Lebanon. Comparing Lebanon to Denmark where the population is only a few thousand lower there is 7x more traffic served to Denmark than to Lebanon.

Beirut IX

The Internet exchange in Beirut is no exception, with fibre access not possible in Lebanon, ISPs reach the IX by microwave. To give the best access from all around Beirut it is situated at the top of a hill. With most Internet exchanges, line of sight isn’t a concern as fibre is available. Our deployment connected to Beirut IX brings over 7 million websites closers to ISPs connected, making the Internet faster and safer for users in Lebanon.