I have been in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for the last few days. This is my first travel to Mongolia and this far up in the North (except for previous travel to Russia in 2016 and some parts of Nordic areas in Europe). Geographically Mongolia is located between Russia (on the North side) and China (on the South side).
I am here for mnNOG 5 event. mnNOG is the Mongolian Network Operators Group.
I was recently discussing with a friend Jio’s Fifa streaming issues. Considering PNI capacity challenges with other telcos, I wonder if they were serving FIFA streams out of their network or if it would be on some CDN like Akamai. As I was testing, I noticed a couple of megs of flow data with my provider’s local IP. Turns out that was a local Google GGC node in Rohtak and as I try to connect to it, it replies on HTTP port 80 and 443.
As returning readers of this blog would be aware - I found a trick to find Facebook caching servers around the world during the APRICOT 2018 hackathon. Since then I am running my code again every year to see the changes and publish this report.
Previous reports
March 2018 here Nov 2019 here April 2021 here Facebook knows! Back in 2019, I was in San Francisco, California for NANOG 75. While roaming around in the lobby, someone read the NANOG card hanging around my neck and greeted me.
Over last couple of years I posted updates on Facebook caching nodes (FNA) deployment across the world. If you would like to read the logic I am using to pull the data, you can check the original post here. While the data is about Facebook FNA, it’s highly likely that networks would have Google GGC nodes alongside (a bit less) Akamai caches.
My last post about it was back in Nov 2019 and it seems just about the time to do a fresh check.
In March 2018 I mapped nodes of Facebook globally using the airport string they use in the CDN URLs (detailed post here). Since then I posted a couple of times updates on as they are adding more nodes. There also have been questions via emails and comments on the blog in recent times about updated data.
Here goes latest data as on 22 Nov 2019. It’s published here.
Global stats Total nodes increased from 2204 as from Aug 2018 to 3184 now in Nov 2019.