RFI Russia

RFI Russia sits at 239 of 710 in France's listing, in the body of the list rather than at either end. This is where most of a national dial actually lives, and it is the part a country hub's first fifty rows never reach.

Russian does not make France's list of commonest broadcast languages, which the hub caps at six. A station like this one is invisible on its own country page's language chart and perfectly visible on the Russian shelf, which is the argument for having both.

Where else Russian is on air, according to the same snapshot: mostly Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The shelf lists all 575 of them together, which is the view a country hub cannot give.

RFI Russia streams at 96 kbps, under France's median of 128 kbps. A lower rate is not automatically worse: speech carries perfectly well below the music threshold, and a station built for phones on a weak connection has a good reason to encode this way.

The stream is served from rfiukraine.ice.infomaniak.ch, which no other entry in France uses in this snapshot. Nothing else in the listing shares its fate: if this address stops answering it is this broadcaster's own outage, and if it plays, it plays.