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Kwangmyong

Kwangmyong: Inside North Korea’s National Intranet Service

Kwangmyong: Inside North Korea’s National Intranet Service

Kwangmyong is North Korea’s national intranet launched in the early 2000s, a closed network that provides email, websites, and digital resources only within North Korea to isolate citizens from the global Internet. <li North Korea’s first internal email service, Sili Bank, was established in 2001 to enable internal electronic correspondence on Kwangmyong. The first intranet “internet café” opened in Pyongyang in 2002 with about 100 computers, marking the start of public access to Kwangmyong. Kwangmyong uses .kp domain names and private IP ranges such as 10.x.x.x, is not routable on the global Internet, and most access is via IP addresses
18 June 2025
Internet Access in North Korea. How North Korea’s Secret Internet Works: Discover the Hidden World of Kwangmyong

Internet Access in North Korea. How North Korea’s Secret Internet Works: Discover the Hidden World of Kwangmyong

Kwangmyong is North Korea’s nationwide domestic intranet that is completely isolated from the World Wide Web and hosts roughly 1,000–5,500 internal websites. Global Internet access is restricted to a tiny elite; only a few dozen websites are reachable from abroad, with a 2016 leak noting 28 .kp domains and North Korea having about 1,024 Internet addresses. Star Joint Venture Co., created around 2009 as a North Korea–Thailand partnership between the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications and Loxley Pacific, is the gatekeeper for international connectivity and IP allocations. Koryolink launched North Korea’s 3G network in December 2008; by 2011 it had
11 March 2025
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