Researchers discover it takes Internet search results 3 times longer to get to Cuba

After President Barack Obama reestablished  diplomatic relations with Cuba at the end of last year, American companies like Netflix and Airbnb announced plans to expand to the Island.

The problem with companies such as these is that they require Internet access , which Cuba somewhat struggles with.

Before 2008 Cuba’s citizen’s were not allowed to own a personal computer. Then in 2011, Cuba completed its first undersea fiber-optic cable with a landing in Venezuela, but the cable was not even activated until two years later. Today, about 25% of Cuba’s population can get online and only 5% of the population has home Internet.

Researchers from Northwestern University’s Engineering Department decided to figure out just how efficient Cuba’s Internet connectivity was.

“Our first reaction was: ‘Really?'” said Fabián E. Bustamante professor of electrical engineering and computer science in Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering. “As a business model, Netflix and Airbnb rely on most people having Internet access. That’s not quite the case in Cuba, so it really didn’t seem to make much sense.”

Bustamante and a graduate student, Zachary Bischof, decided to measure Cuba’s Internet performance. What they found was that Cuba’s Internet connection to the rest of the world was even worse than they expected.

“If you’re trying to connect anywhere, you either have to connect through these marine cables or up to the satellite,” Bustamante said. “If you go up to the satellite, it would take significantly longer.”

“For one, it’s much farther to travel,” Bischof added. “And the trip is on a very interference-rich environment, which include cosmic rays.”

Over the past  eight months, Bustamante and Bischof have been conducting measurements from a server in Havana to observe Internet traffic going in and out of Cuba. They measured the amount of time it took for information to travel in both directions, taking note of the paths of travel. In early results, the team found that information returning to Cuba took a much longer route.

When a person in Havana searched for a topic on Google, for example, the request traveled through the marine cable to Venezuela, then through another marine cable to the United States, and finally landed at a Google server in Dallas, Texas. When the search results traveled back, it went to Miami, Florida, up to the satellite, and then back to Cuba. While the information out of Cuba took 60-70 milliseconds, it took a 270 milliseconds to travel back.

“It takes so long that it’s almost useless,” said Bustamante. “You can start loading a webpage, go have coffee, then come back and maybe you’ll find it.”

Bustamante and Bischof predict that this could be the result of a configuration problem or routing policy and are now doing further research into the issue.

For now, they can only say that Cuba’s Internet performance appears to be among the poorest in the Americas, and its infrastructure would struggle to support web services hosted off the island, particularly network-intensive applications like Netflix. Understanding the problems and diagnosing their causes will help Bustamante, Bischof, and other teams propose future solutions.

“Beyond Internet services like Netflix, to continue societal progress in Cuba depends on better connectivity,” said Bustamante. “To better understand how to improve it, we first have to better understand what is available now.”

For more information visit Northwestern University.