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Cuba's Internet Routing Is Messed Up

Posted by timothy on from the spirit-of-fidel-lives dept.

Internet access in Cuba has gotten far better in the last year, thanks in large part to thawing relations between Cuba's government and the U.S. In the case of a censorship-heavy, technology-impaired regime, though, "better" doesn't necessarily mean good. Northwestern engineering professor Fabián E. Bustamante and graduate student Zachary Bischof decided to quantify the performance of Cuban internet connections, and found them "perhaps even worse than they expected," with regards to routing in particular. Reader TheSync writes with this excerpt: During their study, Bustamante and Bischof found that 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 whopping 270 milliseconds to travel back.

28 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Satellite Internet by davidwr · · Score: 3, Funny

    It puts the "up" in "messed up".

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    1. Re: Satellite Internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This sounds more like a bgp configuration problem on a US based border router.

      Not *that* hard to troubleshoot, just traceroute (TCP trace if some are configured to ignore pings) and look at the relevant bgp configs of the routers along the way to see who is pointing to the wrong autonomous system. A lot of times you don't even need to ask, as they usually have a looking glass configured for this reason.

    2. Re:Satellite Internet by JoeMerchant · · Score: 4, Interesting

      So, in 1990 when I accessed "the Internet" from the University of Miami main campus, the request went from main campus to the Marine school, from there to a satellite, back down somewhere in Colorado, and then started following a somewhat normal routing. Of course, if I was talking to FIU across town, that meant about 7 land hops from Colorado back to Miami...

      Sounds like Cuba's internet is better than U of Miami's was 25 years ago...

    3. Re: Satellite Internet by mwvdlee · · Score: 1

      There are valid uses of the word "like".
      I don't see GP abusing it.

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    4. Re:Satellite Internet by KGIII · · Score: 2

      I don't know a whole hell of a lot but I'm a fairly quick study and I know quite a bit already, maybe it would be fun to go there and volunteer to do some help? A kind of Cuba IT Group or something? My Google-fu is either weak or there's no such group of volunteers. I'd think that it'd be kind of fun. Maybe I can meet Raul and braid Fidel's beard while I'm there?

      Then again, maybe I'd better not 'help.'

      --
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    5. Re: Satellite Internet by jafo · · Score: 4, Informative

      Probably not a "problem", more likely it is a "decision". BGP routing isn't really about finding the fastest or best route, though InterNAP has some special sauce they can add via an appliance to help with that. It is about finding the "shortest" in terms of number of ASNs traversed, often weighted by company policy about what is cheapest. A satellite link directly to Cuba is probably fewer ASN hops than a cable to Venezuela and another cable to Cuba, so BGP picks that as best. The company pushing the traffic out the satellite either don't know to prefer the other path, have congestion on that link (just because it comes in that way doesn't mean it is going out the same link return, and there could be asymmetric loading), or it is more expensive to pass it to that provider. And it could be that using the exact same path to return traffic reduces latency, but increases loss due to overloaded links, so the satellite may provide a way better experience even if it is slower.

      BGP routing can be tricky.

  2. happens everywhere by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    This happens with me on Verizon as well. Traffic between two sites in the same city (Stockholm) goes down to Germany (and routes around a few cities) before it gets back to Stockholm again. Just because Verizon refuses to peer directly with some ISPs.

  3. Censorship? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why the censorship tag if the story is neither about American nor Cuban censorship? Have they verified the delay can be blamed on the NSA?

    1. Re:Censorship? by Sarten-X · · Score: 1

      If anything imperfect happens, it is obviously the result of nefarious government interference.

      So sayeth the hivemind.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
  4. No Better Here by darkain · · Score: 1

    Things are honestly no better here. Living just outside of Seattle, WA, doing a trace route to Amazon's anycast DNS servers routes through some really bullshit routes, depending on which DNS server I query.

    Seattle > Chicago > New York > London > Some random other hops in Europe > AWS
    Seattle > San Jose > Los Angeles > Japan > Some random other hops in South East Asia > AWS

    Never mind that Seattle is Amazon's headquarters, and they have one of their primary facilities just to the south of us in Oregon.

    Reported the issue to the ISP, the ISP's upstream provider, and Amazon. All three gave a "not my problem" response.

    Routing tables are often fucked to hell n back, this is just par for the course of the internet.

  5. Dialup speed? That's fast by davidwr · · Score: 1

    Those old krusty KGB agents are lucky to copy it at reading speed.

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  6. Re:OMG 270 ms by Kjella · · Score: 4, Insightful

    OMG 270 ms! How can the poor Cubans wait that long for a response from a search? Maybe they eat a sandwich during that time?

    If you're a really quick eater.... seriously I know people with satellite connections with ping times like that. Inconvienient? Yes. Censorship? Hell no. If you want to do competitive FPS, you should probably find another ISP. But for generic information reception, processing and dissemination per the UN charter of human rights you're fine.

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  7. Maybe we should copy them by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 2

    Buggering up the routing of most of the traffic from China and a few other places to the rest of the world might be a good idea ...

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    1. Re:Maybe we should copy them by Maow · · Score: 2

      Buggering up the routing of most of the traffic from China and a few other places to the rest of the world might be a good idea ...

      Seems like the traffic out of Cuba is indirect, but the traffic back in is truly messed up.

      And that seems to be entirely on the American side.

      Not that I disagree with what you said, it's just that that's not what is happening here.

  8. Re:OMG 270 ms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Satellite ISP customer here. Tonight I'm averaging about 610ms pings. That means the skies are clear both where I live and where my ISPs has their ground station. 800-1000ms pings are not uncommon for me.

  9. Rest of Worlds is messed up Cuba looks fine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From the description Cuba out is pretty good. It is the return trip that goes via satellite. So it is not Cuba's routing that is messed up, but rather the rest of the worlds routing to Cuba which is messed up.

    Going via Venezuela might be the biggest cable they have. I am pretty sure the is no Havana, Miami direct cable.

    1. Re:Rest of Worlds is messed up Cuba looks fine by mutantSushi · · Score: 1

      Or, to clarify what "censorship" is at play here, the reason behind the download bottleneck here is US government siege/sanctions policy vs. Cuba preventing construction of Florida-Cuba cable. And apparently an unwillingness of US networks/ Google to peer with and route thru Venezuelan networks. All in all, the easiest most direct improvements to the situation are not in Cuban hands here, it would seem.

  10. Re:OMG 270 ms by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

    Anything over 200ms still sucks balls for VOIP and RDP / Citrix based usage. Basically, anything that requires real-time interaction over the web is going to be aggravating when going through space and back down again; speed of light limitation and all that.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
  11. Re:OMG 270 ms by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

    So anything that takes at least one trip to a GEO satellite and back.
    36,000km away, 300,000km/s speed of light. That's about 240ms round trip

  12. Dammit Castro! You listened to APK didn't you? by Cito · · Score: 1

    They had to go fucking with hosts files, now they done went hog wild copying APK hosts files into all routing tables and have fuxx0rd da t00bz!

    Silly Cubans, APK is not for the weak :-P

  13. Not messed up.... by freya_bacchus · · Score: 1

    It's improvised!

    --
    Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity!
  14. Re:OMG 270 ms by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

    If you are an Aussie, every decent game server is a 250+ms round trip.

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  15. Re:OMG 270 ms by PPH · · Score: 1

    If you want to do competitive FPS,

    ... we'll drop you off on a beach in Cuba in person.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  16. Re: OMG 270 ms by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

    "You can't even type FOUR CHARACTERS PER SECOND!"

    I live in South Africa, basically anything, except some content (Google has a node with search and mail in Johannesburg) and CDNs, is 200ms+ (rtt) away.

    In the past I riutinely edited files renotely iver ssh with 250ms rtt, and found no real issues. You most certainly can type at more than 4 chars a second, if you don't wait for each one to appear on screen before typing the next. But you learn not to make mistakes ...

  17. So they don't have any CCNPs? by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

    Most likely whoever runs the border router(s) in question just needs to AS path prepend on the peering session with the satellite provider to make it look worse.

  18. Occam's razor. by sjwt · · Score: 1

    Congestion.

    Im sure you americans don't understand this, but even in other first world countries, bandwidth being saturated in one direction like this gets common in peak times, and when ISPs fail to keep up with growing demand it can become almost permanent.

    Whilst all your American bandwidth and internal routing costs pretty much nothing via sharing agreements, the rest of the world pays a premium to access it, so the lines into Cuba are under heavy load due to little content being hosted there compared to the US.

    Honest to god this made it past everyone?

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  19. Today nearly all Cuban traffic is over the cable by lpress · · Score: 1

    This study was done last spring, when significant amounts of Cuban international traffic were routed over satellite, but in July nearly all international traffic moved to the undersea cable, significantly improving performance. Furthermore, the study used the only RIPE Atlas probe in Cuba, so may not have been representative of the entire island at that time. For details on the transition in July and the situation today, see http://laredcubana.blogspot.com/2015/11/before-and-after-cubas-shift-to-alba-1.html.

  20. Cuban traffic is no longer using satellite by lpress · · Score: 1

    Cuba has moved nearly all international traffic to the undersea cable since the data for this study was collected.