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In and Out of Cuba: Characterizing Cuba's Connectivity

Published: 28 October 2015 Publication History
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  • 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.

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    1. In and Out of Cuba: Characterizing Cuba's Connectivity

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          IMC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference
          October 2015
          550 pages
          ISBN:9781450338486
          DOI:10.1145/2815675
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          Published: 28 October 2015

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          Author Tags

          1. developing countries
          2. measurement
          3. performance
          4. satellite

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          IMC '15: Internet Measurement Conference
          October 28 - 30, 2015
          Tokyo, Japan

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          IMC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 31 of 96 submissions, 32%;
          Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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          • (2023)JS Capsules: A Framework for Capturing Fine-grained JavaScript Memory Measurements for the Mobile WebProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/35793277:1(1-26)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
          • (2023)JS Capsules: A Framework for Capturing Fine-grained JavaScript Memory Measurements for the Mobile Web.Abstract Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems10.1145/3578338.3593548(53-54)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
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          • (2018)Nation-State Hegemony in Internet RoutingProceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3209811.3211887(1-11)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2018
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