Venezuelan crisis has negatively affected country’s Internet

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.

Now, Northwestern University computer scientists have comprehensively examined the effects of the crisis on a previously unexplored area: the Internet.

In a new study, the researchers found the crisis has significantly — and negatively — 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.

“Venezuela has seen no investment in infrastructure across all critical components of the Internet,” said Northwestern’s Esteban Carisimo, the study’s first author. “As a result, the country’s Internet speeds trail behind the entire region, with median speeds at about 10% of the regional average. Under these conditions, modern services cannot run properly, and user experience is extremely degraded.”

Carisimo will present the research next week at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Data Communications Conference (SIGCOMM) in Sydney, Australia. “Ten Years of the Venezuelan Crisis: An Internet Perspective” will take place at 11:05 a.m. (AEST) on Tuesday (August 6), as a part of the session “Making Networks Safe and Secure.”

Carisimo is a postdoctoral scholar at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where he is advised by Fabian E. Bustamante. Bustamante is a professor of computer science at McCormick and the study’s corresponding author.

To conduct the study, Carisimo, Bustamante and their collaborators 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.

“While the rest of Latin America has seen substantial growth in network infrastructure, such as an increasing number of submarine cables and peering facilities, Venezuela has been left behind,” said Bustamante, who directs the AquaLab, a research group that investigates large-scale networks and distributed systems.

“Venezuela has seen no such expansion, leaving its state-owned Internet provider, CANTV, without U.S.-based transit routes and increasing its reliance on domestic markets,” Carisimo said. “The consequences of these discrepancies are stark. For instance, while global download speeds have improved significantly, 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.”

The research team also found clear signs of decline in Venezuela’s DNS infrastructure. Efficient DNS servers should be in proximity to users to minimize response time and ensure resilience, but the researchers found the exact opposite, Carisimo said. Venezuela predominantly relies on overseas resources for DNS services, with most of these servers located in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands.

“Users relying on Google’s popular public DNS service face latencies twice as high as the regional average,” Bustamante said. “As networks constantly evolve to support increasing traffic and the demand for a better quality of experience, Venezuela’s crisis likely impedes capital investments to match the pace of growth seen in its Latin American peers.”

Without stable, reliable Internet access, Venezuelan citizens cannot access educational resources, entertainment, government services or financial institutions. Perhaps even worse, they cannot reach family members and friends who have migrated across the continent.

“Personal communications are especially important for Venezuela, a country that has experienced a diaspora of approximately 25% of its population,” Carisimo said. “Without reliable and affordable Internet, many families are left with little chance of communication, exacerbating the sense of separation.”