The Internet is a critical infrastructure of modern society, when services are disrupted, or operations are not optimal this can adversely affect the economic standing of a country and its future productivity. This appears to be the case with Venezuela.
A new study examines Venezuela’s connectivity landscape over the past decade. This comes from Northwestern University computer scientists. The study finds that due to political instability Venezuela’s Internet infrastructure has deteriorated. In particular, the researchers found that Internet speeds in Venezuela are approximately 10 percent of the regional average
As the Venezuelan crisis intensifies, researchers and policy experts have worked to understand its ramifications on the country’s politics, economics, health services, water security, infrastructure and more.
In a new study, the researchers found the crisis has significantly affected Venezuela’s Internet infrastructure and connectivity. Compared to the average Internet service in peer Latin American countries, Venezuelan Internet speeds are excruciatingly slow, and network growth is stagnant.
To conduct the study, the researchers examined Venezuela’s full connectivity landscape throughout the past 10 years. This included studying the core infrastructure to access networks, bandwidth measurements, the submarine cable network and routes to Domain Name System (DNS) servers.
While the region has added numerous submarine cables, Venezuela has established only one new connection to Cuba. Argentina and Brazil also created multiple Internet exchange points, which expanded interdomain connectivity and increased Internet speeds.
In addition, Venezuela has seen no expansion, leaving its state-owned Internet provider, CANTV without U.S.-based transit routes and increasing its reliance on domestic markets. Consequently, Venezuela’s average download speed has stagnated below 1 megabyte per second for over a decade, lagging far behind the rest of Latin America, where median speeds are around 20 megabytes per second.
“Venezuela has seen no investment in infrastructure across all critical components of the Internet,” explains lead researcher Esteban Carisimo.
He adds: “As a result, the country’s Internet speeds trail behind the entire region, with median speeds at about 10 percent of the regional average. Under these conditions, modern services cannot run properly, and user experience is extremely degraded.”
The findings were presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Data Communications Conference (SIGCOMM) in Sydney, Australia. The event is titled “Ten Years of the Venezuelan Crisis: An Internet Perspective”, as a part of the session “Making Networks Safe and Secure.”
