Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Connectivity remains slow and variable

A colleague in Cuba ran traceroute from a computer on a dial up link in Havana to several destinations in Cuba, Venezuela and the US. The following table shows the round trip latency time for three tests to each destination:
As you see, the international connections are very slow. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to use a modern Web site at any of those locations. Only the third test on the last line (to the US) seems to be using the ALBA-1 cable one-way.

Not only are the times slow, the variance to the same location is very high. Consider again the last line -- three tests resulted in three very different times. Even the variance within Cuba is high.

I cannot explain this -- some may be due to problems with my colleague's computer or Internet connection -- but hopefully we will see improvement soon.

If others run tests from Cuba and get different results, let us know (in confidence).

3 comments:

  1. The variance in normal if your colleague was using dial up. Phone lines in Cuba are usually very old, noisy and unstable.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow -- at that speed TCP would really degrade or time out most Web sites. What is it like to use, say, Facebook from one of those dial-up connections?

    (I was in Myanmar a while ago and could not use my university on-line registration system -- see http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/12/impressions-of-internet-in-yangon.html).

    ReplyDelete
  3. The same happens to me with a Canadian university and its online registration system every time I go to Cuba. The student's online email (they use horde webmail I think) does not work there either. Gmail works in plain HTML-mode but not in full mode, and facebook kind of works if I use the mobile version.

    ReplyDelete

Real Time Analytics