Quiet Work Between Storms: Growing Caribbean Internet Resilience

Co-founder of the Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG), Director of Caribbean Affairs at the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), and Advisor to Packet Clearing House (PCH), Wooding embodies the kind of organisation CaribNOG itself is: a self-organised, multilingual community of Caribbean technical volunteers who have been quietly building the region's internet infrastructure for two decades, connecting across borders, language barriers, and jurisdictional boundaries, because no one else was going to do it.

Their work has never been more urgent.

Caribbean islands were still rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Melissa, when CaribNOG and PCH signed a memorandum of cooperation in St. George's, Grenada. PCH's Secretary General, Bill Woodcock, was there in person for the signing, formalising a partnership that both organisations described as essential to building a more resilient Caribbean.

"Resilience isn't built in the moment of impact," the signatories noted, "but in the months and years of quiet preparation before it."

Claire Craig, a Director of CaribNOG, signed the MOU on behalf of CaribNOG. She is also the scholar whose PhD work maps the region's Internet exchange point development landscape.

An internet exchange point, or IXP, is where networks meet to exchange local traffic locally, keeping Caribbean data in the Caribbean rather than routing it through Miami or other longer, costlier and less secure international gateways. When crisis hits and international links go down, a local IXP is what keeps the Internet from going dark.

The MOU signing was not a beginning but a formalisation. Craig named PCH in the same breath as ARIN, and the Internet Society and the Caribbean Telecommunications Union among the organisations that drove Caribbean IXP development from its earliest days.

IXPs have taken root across the Caribbean slowly and unevenly, but persistently.

First in Cuba in 2001. Others followed: Haiti, Grenada, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago in the 2009–2014 wave; Puerto Rico in 2019; Curacao, Guyana, Saint Martin, St Barths, St. Kitts and Nevis and Suriname in this decade. Nineteen territories total.

Grenada is instructive, and not only because the MOU was signed there. Brent McIntosh, who helped build the Grenada IXP (GREX), was direct about what PCH's support had meant in practice. From the outset, his team had access to peering policy templates, memoranda of understanding frameworks, and multi-stakeholder governance models. It was a ready-made institutional architecture that allowed Grenada to move from concept to functioning IXP without having to invent the rules from scratch.

"We got a really nice template that we were able to work from, supported by PCH," he said. "It was a little easier for us."

GREX's path was not without turbulence. A merger between two major providers briefly reduced the exchange to two active peers, threatening its viability. But smaller ISPs found workarounds, connecting via radio when incumbents wouldn't provide last-mile access. Resilience did not happen by accident. It was built into the governance architecture from the start, with PCH's framework as the foundation.

Jamaica's story runs on a different clock, although JAIXP was first established in the same founding wave as Grenada, with PCH donating the initial switch and Bill Woodcock, PCH's Secretary General, personally assisting with pre-launch advocacy. But JAIXP did not develop into the multi-stakeholder model its founders envisioned. Governance challenges slowed it. The exchange survived but stalled.

What matters is that the people who planted it then are still tending it today. And that is its own kind of infrastructure.

Evona Channer of the Office of Utilities Regulation was at the founding. She was at the relaunch on Day Two of CaribNOG 31, the group's twice-yearly forum, held this April in Kingston, Jamaica. So was PCH. The replacement of JAIXP’s original switch—a milestone in JAIXP’s renewal—came, she noted, through "the generosity of Packet Clearing House."

Trevor Forrest, Senior Advisor to Jamaica's Minister without Portfolio for Science, Technology and Special Projects, has spent years arguing that internet infrastructure is national security infrastructure. At CaribNOG 31, he connected the dots plainly: a well-designed cyberattack, he said, can produce the same impact as a natural disaster. The lights go out either way. When the hurricane comes, every gap in how infrastructure was designed, governed, and sustained becomes visible at once. Local internet exchange infrastructure, he argued, is not a technical nicety but a critical national asset, as foundational as roads or ports, and must be treated as such from the design stage, not bolted on afterward.

He was measured and resolute about Jamaica's next step.

"I would like to say that we are going to make it work this time."

Nineteen territories. Two decades. The storm will come again. The work to prepare continues.