India had no FreeBSD mirror sites ?!?

[Anthony Atkielski]

N. Raghavendra writes:

> Traffic between two hosts located in India is usually routed through
> US or European networks.

Why??

> A `whois' lookup for 208.192.183.149, says that the address belongs to
> UUNET Technologies, Inc., VA, US.  The address 134.159.128.42 belongs
> to Reach Networks HK Ltd, Hong Kong.  As I understand it, this means
> that traffic from Allahabad goes to the US, and then to Hong Kong,
> before it reaches Bombay.

The IT equivalent of the proverbial slow boat to China.  At least most
of the world's secret services get a peak at all Indian traffic, I
guess.

> Therefore, the geographical proximity of two hosts within India does
> not imply their proximity on the Internet.

Is digging a ditch and laying fiber between them out of the question?

> In addition to such routing troubles, most Indian sites suffer from
> severe bandwidth paucity.

Because it doesn't exist, or because telecoms and ISPs are gouging them
with their pricing?

-- 
Anthony