Cuba's Internet Routing Is Messed Up

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.

Comments

Satellite Internet

[davidwr]

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

Re: Satellite Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Satellite Internet

[JoeMerchant]

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...

Re:Satellite Internet

[KGIII]

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.'

Re: Satellite Internet

[jafo]

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.

Censorship?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:OMG 270 ms

[Kjella]

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.

Maybe we should copy them

[BarbaraHudson]

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 ...

Re:Maybe we should copy them

[Maow]

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.

Re:OMG 270 ms

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Rest of Worlds is messed up Cuba looks fine

[Anonymous Coward]

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.