The E-commerce Association states that its efforts have yielded some results, leading to the removal of certain previous restrictions on the country’s internet. Simultaneously, a network expert confirms that some openings have occurred that are impactful on the user experience of internet users.
According to IDEA News, it was towards the end of the month of Tir (June) when the E-commerce Association released a report on the state of the internet in the country, which depicted unfavorable internet conditions.
In this report, the association described Iran as the “champion of low-quality internet” in the world, stating: “Among the top 100 countries with the highest gross domestic product, Iran ranks second in terms of disrupted internet after Myanmar, second in terms of restricted internet after China, and among the 5 slowest internet connections in the world.”
The Ministry of Communications also responded to this report and even delved into its technical dimensions in a session with members of the association. Although the CEO of the Telecommunications Infrastructure Company did not accept the disruptions outlined in the report during this session, Nima Ghazi, the head of the Tehran E-commerce Association, has now announced that some of the previous internet restrictions have been lifted.
E-commerce Association: We Approach More Entities to Address Our Demands
Ghazi states: Access to quality internet is a universal demand in the country, an order also given by the President, and we’ve seen the Parliament inquire about it. Our work in the association was to provide methods for monitoring and measuring actions in this area. We are hopeful for the availability of higher quality internet for all citizens and strive towards this hope.
He continues: We concluded that as the private sector, we need to transcend the general demand for quality internet and propose our own indicators and transparent methods for quality measurement, monitor the network’s status at various layers, and, most importantly, present our detailed and coherent plans to various departments, organizations, and officials and follow up on them.
Ghazi explains the lifted restrictions: For example, the deployment of the HTTP/3 protocol, which is the latest generation of the HTTP protocol, results in a 20 to 35 percent increase in website loading speed. Another instance of improvement is in addressing upload speed issues and some disruptions on international destinations.
The head of the Tehran E-commerce Association declares that these efforts will continue: We are determined to continue this activity. We will certainly carry on monitoring various issues, publish periodic reports, and inform the public about the status and progress of the matter.
The E-commerce Association intends to engage with other entities besides the Ministry of Communications. In this regard, he states: We intend to communicate with other bodies, including the committee responsible for defining illegal content, which holds the responsibility for filtering. The officials of domestic websites and platforms that access their sites from Iran for security reasons, as well as international internet service providers that have limited our bandwidth due to sanctions, are also part of our monitoring program.
A Network Expert: Internet Quality is Improving
Vahid Farid, a network expert and a technology enthusiast, is another individual we reached out to for inquiry about the recent developments. Farid, in relation to the technical dimensions of the matter, states: The restrictions on Cloudflare IPs and Cloudflare domains have been somewhat reduced, and the main Cloudflare domains that provide services, such as the Worker. Dev and Pager. Dev domains offering free and non-free services have been unblocked.
He adds regarding the reasons behind these occurrences: These incidents could have numerous causes, but the most significant one is the activism of individuals and the damages inflicted on businesses. These domains are used by businesses, both visibly and inconspicuously, in their various services. I believe the pressures that affected the IT sector’s economy and the E-commerce Association’s efforts, which effectively presented the situation through a comprehensive report backed by statistics and figures, have led to these developments.
This network expert continues: Perhaps many government stakeholders faced issues as well and saw the extent of filtering prompting them to use circumvention tools themselves. The burden on families due to the heavy usage of circumvention tools by children and adolescents is considerable. Now, officials have come to the conclusion that the strategy of trying to hinder VPNs by disrupting Cloudflare was a mistake.
He also elucidates the tangible impact this occurrence has on user experience: Clearly, these changes improve internet quality. According to official statistics, 60 percent of traffic to the top 10,000 websites worldwide goes through Cloudflare. Intentional disruptions to Cloudflare even caused issues for unfiltered websites. Of course, not all these problems were related to Cloudflare filtering; sometimes, range IPs were blocked or disrupted, resulting in a connection speed to a site that used to be fast becoming very slow.
In his belief, the operators are also adversely affected by these conditions: In recent months, operators have been under pressure to account for traffic costs. The reason is that if Packet Loss increases on an operator’s network, the actual user download might be, for example, 20 Mbps, but the operator charges for 50 Mbps. In this process, a certain number of packets are lost.
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