In and out of Cuba: Characterizing Cuba's connectivity

Zachary S. Bischof, John P. Rula, Fabian E. Bustamante

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

The goal of our work is to characterize the current state of Cuba's access to the wider Internet. This work is motivated by recent improvements in connectivity to the island and the growing commercial interest following the ease of restrictions on travel and trade with the US. In this paper, we profile Cuba's networks, their connections to the rest of the world, and the routes of international traffic going to and from the island. Despite the addition of the ALBA-1 submarine cable, we find that round trip times to websites hosted off the island remain very high; pings to popular websites frequently took over 300 ms. We also find a high degree of path asymmetry in traffic to/from Cuba. Specifically, in our analysis we find that traffic going out of Cuba typically travels through the ALBA-1 cable, but, surprisingly, traffic on the reverse path often traverses high-latency satellite links, adding over 200 ms to round trip times. Last, we analyze queries to public DNS servers and SSL certificate requests to characterize the availability of network services in Cuba.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationIMC 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Internet Measurement Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages487-493
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781450338486
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 28 2015
EventACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2015 - Tokyo, Japan
Duration: Oct 28 2015Oct 30 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
Volume2015-October

Other

OtherACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2015
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityTokyo
Period10/28/1510/30/15

Keywords

  • Developing countries
  • Measurement
  • Performance
  • Satellite

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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