Turkmenistan's Entire Internet Runs Through Three Foreign IPs

Turkmenistan has four land neighbors, a Caspian coastline, and roughly six million people. You would expect its internet — like any medium-sized country's — to reach the world through a handful of fiber routes crossing the nearest borders. It does not. On 21 April 2026, we fired measurements from four of our own probes and nine RIPE Atlas probes across the region toward three Turkmen government endpoints: turkmenistan.gov.tm, turkmentv.gov.tm, and tmcell.tm. Thirty-one traceroutes came back. They converged on three IP addresses. That is the entire international internet of Turkmenistan, measured from the outside.

Two Doors, Three Addresses

Every single traceroute that completed its journey entered Turkmenistan through exactly one of three routers, operated by exactly three foreign network operators:

On the Turkmen side of those gateways, every trace terminated in a single network: AS20661, State Company of Electro Communications Turkmentelecom — the state monopoly that owns the country's internet. Of the twenty-four IPv4 prefixes announced from Turkmenistan on the global routing table, twenty belong to AS20661. Four-fifths of the country's IP space is one government entity.

Two gateways account for twenty-nine out of thirty-one traces. The Azerbaijani route (Delta Telecom across the Caspian) and the Uzbek route (Uzbektelekom overland from Tashkent) are the only two paths a meaningful share of international traffic actually takes. The Russian path via Rostelecom exists, but in our sample only two probes ever used it, and the rest of the time it does not appear as an option. Turkmenistan is, in the literal infrastructural sense, a two-gateway country.

The Iran Paradox: Neighbors Without a Peer

Iran and Turkmenistan share about 1,100 kilometers of land border. The Iranian city of Mashhad lies roughly 240 kilometers from Ashgabat. Geographically, an Iran-Turkmenistan internet link would be shorter than a Tehran-to-Shiraz trunk inside Iran itself. Yet it does not exist as a routable path in our measurements.

We measured from four different Iranian RIPE Atlas probes, each connected to a different Iranian ISP. Every one of them reached Turkmenistan the long way:

Iran and Turkmenistan are not peers. Their carriers do not exchange traffic directly. To reach a neighbor whose border is sometimes visible from the other side, Iranian packets travel through Istanbul or Frankfurt — and in one case across the Atlantic to the United States and back through Helsinki. What looks on a map like a 240-kilometer trip is, on the wire, a five-to-ten-thousand-kilometer detour every time.

One Iranian Probe's Long Way Home

Of all the traces we collected, one stood out. RIPE Atlas probe 1012845, connected to an Iranian consumer ISP (AS24940), reached tmcell.tm — the mobile operator serving most Turkmen phones — by the following path:

Round-trip time: 195 milliseconds. To complete a request from an Iranian living room to a Turkmen mobile operator, the packet crossed the Atlantic westbound, touched the United States, returned eastbound through Nordic and Central Europe, swung south to the Caspian — and finally crossed a border it could have reached by walking less than a kilometer.

This is not a misconfiguration. This is the routine shape of a certain class of Iranian consumer traffic reaching a neighbor. Sanctions, national-filtering infrastructure, and the absence of direct Iran-Turkmenistan peering make the shortest routable path run through North America.

Kazakhstan's Detour

Kazakhstan shares a 379-kilometer border with Turkmenistan. Our own probe in Almaty is about 900 kilometers from Ashgabat as the crow flies. On the wire, that distance takes 112 milliseconds — roughly the same latency as from Tbilisi, a thousand kilometers farther.

The reason is the path. From Almaty, traffic does not head south across the shared desert border. It heads north-west into Russia, then swings back south through Uzbekistan, and only then reaches Turkmenistan. Six Kazakh probes show the same pattern. There is no Kazakh-Turkmen direct internet interconnect in our data. A 900-kilometer geographic hop becomes a 4,000-kilometer network hop because the Kazakh and Turkmen carriers have never agreed to peer.

One Country, One ASN

On the public BGP routing table, Turkmenistan looks small. The country announces twenty-four IPv4 prefixes and a single IPv6 prefix. Six to eight autonomous system numbers are visible as originating inside Turkmenistan. By comparison, neighboring Kazakhstan operates several hundred ASNs; Uzbekistan, over a hundred; Iran, more than a thousand.

Within Turkmenistan, one ASN dominates: AS20661, TurkmenTelecom. It alone announces twenty of the twenty-four prefixes. Every trace we made, regardless of which international gateway it used, terminated in AS20661. The handful of other Turkmen ASNs — including AS51495 (TMCell mobile) and AS47899 — appear as customers of TurkmenTelecom, not as independent peers with their own upstreams. In practical terms, Turkmenistan has a single national operator that decides which foreign peers are reached, and how.

The TLD That Lives in Uzbekistan

Every country-code top-level domain depends on a set of authoritative name servers. Turkmenistan's is .tm, operated by the state. The primary nameserver, ns1.nic.tm, resolves to the IP address 195.69.189.1. That IP does not live in Ashgabat. It sits in TAS-IX, the internet exchange in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

This is not unusual for small ccTLDs — many rely on friendly neighbors or commercial anycast networks for DNS. What is notable is the direction of dependence. A country whose international internet runs through two foreign doors also relies on one of those same neighbors to resolve its own domain names. If the Tashkent exchange goes dark, .tm domains stop resolving for much of the world.

The Probe Graveyard

RIPE Atlas, the global active-measurement network operated by the RIPE NCC, currently runs about 14,500 probes in roughly 170 countries. Across six countries near Turkmenistan — Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and China — 719 probes are presently active.

Inside Turkmenistan, the count is zero. Not "few." Not "only state-run." Zero.

Five probes have been hosted in Turkmenistan in the measurement network's history: three in TurkmenTelecom's AS20661, one in AS47899, one in TMCell's AS51495. All five are recorded as Abandoned — the status RIPE Atlas assigns to probes that have been offline long enough to be presumed gone. Every attempt to establish an active measurement vantage point inside the country has ended this way. We do not know whether the probes were deliberately disconnected, blocked at the carrier level, or simply failed and were never replaced. What we know is that today, no one can measure Turkmen internet from the inside.

This is why our data in this piece comes from outside. Every probe, every trace, every latency figure above was taken from Uzbekistan, Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Israel, Georgia, or our own infrastructure. Turkmenistan is a country you can only observe at its borders.

What It Means for Six Million People

The everyday consequences of this topology are quieter than the numbers suggest, but they compound. When two router interfaces in two foreign countries carry the international traffic of a whole state, the failure modes are narrow. If the Baku gateway has an outage, every AZ-routed flow reroutes to Tashkent — or fails. If the Tashkent gateway hiccups, the other direction takes the load. If both had a bad day at the same time — something that has happened in nearby regions for reasons as mundane as a construction accident — the country's external connectivity would not degrade; it would stop.

Price follows topology. Turkmenistan consistently ranks among the most expensive countries in the world per megabit of home internet, and among the slowest. That is not an accident of market structure alone; it is what happens when a single national operator must buy transit from exactly two foreign incumbents, each of whom knows there is no competitor across the border.

Turkmenistan does not appear often in global internet-freedom indices without also appearing near the bottom — Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders have ranked it with or just above North Korea for years. The usual frame for that ranking is political: one-party state, blocked VPNs, restricted news. The less-discussed part is the physical substrate of the restriction. You do not need a firewall if your country has two outlets. You just need to talk to their operators.

Try It Yourself

Every measurement ID in this piece is public. The RIPE Atlas API will return the raw traceroute results of the wave we ran on 21 April 2026 at any time: 166566394, 166566414, 166566435, 166566472, 166566494, 166566513. Rerun any of them against our Turkmen targets and you will see the same two gateways appear. Or point your own traceroute at turkmenistan.gov.tm and tmcell.tm: the last hop before the country name changes will almost certainly be in Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan. There is no third door.

This is the first of a short series on countries whose internet topology tells a structural story. Turkmenistan is the extreme case. The next pieces will look at Azerbaijan — a country that got its first submarine cable only this year — and at the country that sits one step further in isolation: North Korea, where our traceroutes do not find a path at all.