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

Rumors of Russian Internet services degrading have been greatly exaggerated, despite unprecedented announcements recently from two of the world’s biggest backbone providers that they were exiting the country following its invasion of Ukraine. Just as ISPs provide links connecting individuals or organizations to the Internet, backbone services are the service providers that connect ISPs in one part of the world with those elsewhere. These so-called transit providers route massive amounts of traffic from one ISP or backbone to another. Earlier this week Russian ISPs saw the exit of two of their biggest providers. One was Lumen, the top Internet transit provider to Russia. The other was Cogent, one of the biggest Internet backbone carriers in the world. But network metrics show that connectivity continues as it has historically. There are several reasons for this. One is that the exit of a single transit provider from a country the size of Russia—or two in this case—doesn’t have enough of an impact to degrade overall service. Another reason is that both Lumen and Cogent continue to provide transit services to the outposts of major Russian ISPs as long as those outposts aren’t located inside Russia.