Bosnia and Herzegovina proxies

The country is pinned with a suffix in the login. Host, port and password stay the same as for any other country.

A city goes in as a second suffix. In Bosnia it is more useful to think about the carrier than about the city: it carries more information here, and the next section explains why.

We counted, across our own pool, which entities each network appears in, and the picture came out almost without exceptions. HT Eronet from Mostar sits in 18 cities, all 18 in the Federation. Telemach BH in 14 cities, all in the Federation. Blicnet from Banja Luka in 14 cities of Republika Srpska plus Brčko, and none in the Federation.

Two of the large ones appear in both entities, but heavily skewed. BH Telecom: 19 cities in the Federation against one in Republika Srpska. m:tel the other way round: 21 cities in Republika Srpska, six in the Federation, one in Brčko.

The tally: twelve networks out of eighteen appear only in the Federation, one only in Republika Srpska, and five in both. So pinning a carrier in Bosnia effectively pins a part of the country. That is not a side effect but a property of the market: telecoms here grew along the same line as the administrative division.

In practice this is a tool rather than an obstacle. If you need an address in the Federation, take BH Telecom, HT Eronet or Telemach. If you need Republika Srpska, take m:tel or Blicnet. And the reverse: pin a carrier at random and you get not a random Bosnian address but one with a definite regional affiliation.

We counted characters on live Bosnian pages, and the second half of the picture matched the first. Republika Srpska writes in Cyrillic: the RTRS broadcaster carries 8383 Cyrillic characters against 337 Latin, the Republika Srpska government 2740 against 246.

The Federation writes in Latin: the Klix and Avaz outlets carry zero Cyrillic against more than nine thousand Latin characters each, and the Federation government six Cyrillic against 5531 Latin.

Put that together with the previous section and you get a chain: the carrier determines the entity, the entity determines the script. For data collection that means keyword lists are needed in both spellings, and the choice of carrier affects which half of the results you see.

The third link turned out to be broken. Klix and Avaz, Bosnian outlets, are labelled hr, that is Croatian. The Republika Srpska government site, written in Cyrillic, is labelled en. RTRS has no language attribute at all. OLX.ba, the main platform in the country, is labelled en.

So in Bosnia the markup tells you neither the language, nor the script, nor the entity. Determine all of it from the content.

For comparison across our catalogue: in Tunisia the lang attribute can be relied on, in Serbia it tells you nothing, in Algeria it actively misleads, and here it is wrong on four of the seven sites we checked.

We checked twenty well known Bosnian domains from Europe with a full browser header set. Seventeen opened: OLX.ba, Autopijaca, Posao.ba, the Klix, Avaz and Nezavisne outlets, the RTRS and BHRT broadcasters, the Bingo retailer, the UniCredit and Raiffeisen banks, the BH Telecom, m:tel and HT Eronet carriers, the governments of both entities and the tax administration.

Three did not answer, and none of the three is bot protection or a country barrier. The konzum.ba domain does not resolve at all, nlb.ba refuses the connection, and nekretnine.ba returns a five hundred server error.

We did not meet a cf-mitigated header once. Bosnia came out as the most open country of the recent batch: Greece has three sites behind a Cloudflare challenge, Peru seven, here zero. So a Bosnian address is needed not to get through, but to land in the right half of the country.

Sarajevo holds eight networks, the most in the country. Then Zenica with six and Tuzla with five, and after that straight to three and below. In 43 cities out of 75 there is exactly one network.

Real rotation across autonomous systems is possible only in Sarajevo. In every other city you get one or two networks, and the choice comes down to which entity you need.

One separate entry in the pool worth knowing about: Starlink, in exactly one city. A satellite exit does not look like a home connection.

The currency is the convertible mark, pegged to the euro. A basket in euros gives away a foreigner more gently than elsewhere, but it gives them away.

There are three official languages, and in text they differ by small things a native speaker notices. An Accept-Language header without a South Slavic entry looks foreign on a local version of a page.

The time zone is Central European and the clocks change.

Connections in Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Tuzla hold well. In small towns the lines belong to local operators and there is usually one network.

On size, plainly: eighteen networks by name, five of them large. Plan your load against five, and remember that half of them live in one entity only.

The short fork, and an unusual one here.

It is counted in traffic. A dollar per gigabyte.

Bosnia is not in the European Union, it is a candidate, so the GDPR does not apply here directly. Its own personal data protection law applies instead.

Communications regulation is state level, handled by the Communications Regulatory Agency, even though the market is divided between the entities in practice.

A proxy changes none of what you are allowed to do with data. It changes only which country the request appears to come from.

Confirm the exit is Bosnian, that the carrier is the one you asked for, and that you landed in the entity you wanted.