from 1995-1996, i placed a DNS root server in Antarctica. Funding for the bandwidth cost was high enough that I pulled the service. Never really delved into the actual requirement for "real-time" interactions that could not be localized. caching and batch transfers cover most of the need. for more recent work on high bandwidth delay environments, check out: http://ipnsig.org/

/wm

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 2:15 AM Ask Bjørn Hansen <ask@develooper.com> wrote:

Hi,

I have a hobby project running DNS service to people looking for NTP public servers. I noticed that the DNS servers apparently get ~5 thousand queries per day from IPs that the GeoIP database we use claim are in in Antarctica. It’s less than 0.0001% of the overall DNS queries, but it made me curious what it’d take to make the service work better there.

I imagine the internet service is fragmented between the various stations with each being best connected to a particular country? Does anyone have contacts there that I could talk to? I imagine (some of?) the stations would have a local NTP service as part of their compute facilities.

Ask