Foreign technology companies move equipment closer to Russia
Google, TikTok and a number of other foreign companies have placed caching equipment in data centres in Warsaw to be closer to Russian and Belarusian users. This was announced by Vitaly Karbovsky, deputy director general of the Belarusian National Traffic Exchange Centre (NTEC), at a forum in St. Petersburg.
According to an RBC report, Karbovsky noted that due to sanctions, content delivery networks (CDNs) that were built in Russia before 2022 are not being upgraded. In Warsaw, he said, the equipment is now more powerful than in Frankfurt am Main, where the Internet exchange point (IXP) with foreign providers that is most popular among Russian operators is located.
Karbowski also explained that the IXP in Frankfurt, which is traditionally used by operators from Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, is currently overloaded, partly due to the growth in the number of VPN service users. In addition, due to geography, traffic from Warsaw to Moscow via Belarus is 14–15 milliseconds faster than from Frankfurt.
"We have been asking our foreign partners for more than two years to place servers there [in Warsaw], as it is the closest possible location for servers, given the sanctions and other specifics. The logic is clear to foreign companies — traffic from Russian users is coming in, and it needs to be delivered somehow," added Nikolai Metlyuk, CEO of Piter-IX (an IXP in St. Petersburg).
The speed at which videos and other content can be downloaded by Russian users depends partly on how far away the user is from the server from which the content is downloaded, RBC says. Until 2022, the largest content providers tried to locate caching servers in Russia or negotiated the delivery of their content with large CDN providers operating worldwide. For example, Google placed Google Global Cache servers in Russia, as it did in other countries. However, after the military operation began in Ukraine, Google suspended its activities in Russia and stopped upgrading this equipment.