Caribbean IRL

In Bridgetown, Barbados, a final-year Ross med student is sweatily uploading a big coursework assignment. That little progress bar has barely budged for three seconds. In this economy? The margin for error is thinner than that single bar of Wi-Fi leaking from the townhouse across the street. (Long story.)

Final year. Last assignment. Job application goes in next week. The one that justifies the student loan, the years away from home, the family's patience. Everything has been pointing at this moment.

And right now, this moment is pointing at a progress bar. It has barely moved in…thirteen seconds.

Nobody thinks about the internet until it's gone. In the Caribbean, gone has a season. A Category 5 hurricane used to be a once-in-a-century event. In parts of the Caribbean, it now arrives every five years.

That's not a forecast. It's the operating condition.

When a hurricane hits, the internet is not a convenience. It is the coordination layer. Aid logistics. Emergency response. Families locating families. Financial transactions in the aftermath. Government communications across islands that can no longer reach each other by road.

Take it out, and the response itself goes dark.

Anansi story. Willemstad, Curaçao. Honeymooners wrapping up their first trip are asking their shuttle driver to get in one last selfie. In a sec, they'll be posting matching "Missing it already! Te awero.😭❤️🌴" and "Ayo. We'll be back! ✈️🌊✨" reels.

Visiting is one thing. Leaving, its own emotion.

Nos lo bolbe.

For almost two decades, a self-organised community of Caribbean technical volunteers has been building and maintaining that layer. Multilingual. Cross-border. The Caribbean Network Operators Group, or CaribNOG, did not wait for a mandate. They've been doing the work. Bevil Wooding, CaribNOG's co-founder and the connective tissue between the institutions that have shaped Caribbean internet development, has been at the centre of it since the beginning.

That work spans two decades and several areas. Critical internet infrastructure. IPv6 deployment — the latest protocol for identifying machines connected to the internet. Technical training, from network design to cybersecurity. Advocacy for the knowledge-sharing and research the region needs to govern its own digital future.

One of the most visible results is the proliferation and development of internet exchange points across the region. 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.

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. Each one a node of autonomy: data that stays local, routes that don't depend on Miami, networks that can survive when the international links go down.


Digital resilience. Digital sovereignty. Cybersecurity. Hurricanes Beryl and Melissa forced all three onto the agenda at once.

"Beryl and Melissa did a number on several Caribbean countries," Wooding said. "That has entirely shifted the conversation around the need for greater network autonomy. More people are listening to what we've been saying for the past decade."

Crick crack. Mo Bay, Jamaica. A Hurricane Melissa response crew, hangry and finally on lunch break, is getting after it on WhatsApp. The first and most urgent survey is: Tastee or Juicee? The word choice in the group chat is starting to pack heat of its own. Rahtid!

The infrastructure CaribNOG built to help the Caribbean survive the storm sits in the path of the next one.

Every IXP. Every trained engineer. Every donated switch. Built in the window between disasters. Vulnerable to the next one.

In December 2025, Caribbean islands were still rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Melissa, when CaribNOG and Packet Clearing House signed a memorandum of cooperation in St. George's, Grenada. PCH was hardly a newcomer to this work. The organisation had been donating switches, providing technical assistance, and showing up in person since the earliest IXPs took root across the region.

Bill Woodcock, PCH's Secretary General, was there for the signing, as he had been, in one form or another, for much of what came before. The partnership both organisations described as essential to building a more resilient Caribbean had, in practice, already been underway for decades.

Krik? Krak! Baie-Mahault, Guadeloupe. A serial entrepreneur-founder-owner-CEO is sending what she swears will be the last Slack message of the night, before locking up the office and switching her status to "Call me if anything,” knowing there almost always is.

« Appelez-moi si jamais. »

Eddy Kayihura knows something about building internet infrastructure in places that couldn't wait for someone else to do it. As a pioneer of internet development on the African continent, he has spent years working to build the kind of resilient, locally-governed digital infrastructure that gives nations control over their own connectivity. He arrived at CaribNOG 31 in Kingston as PCH's Director of Government Affairs, and on his first Caribbean tour.

Across three days, he listened as practitioners catalogued what his organisation and its partners had built here. The donated switches. The governance templates. The training programs. The Secretary General who showed up in person. The community that kept showing up, year after year, forum after forum.

"I am amazed to hear how much work PCH has done in the Caribbean," he told the room.

Not naïveté but recognition. Or rather indictment.

If a man who has spent a career doing exactly this work on another continent did not know, the IMF does not know. The World Bank does not know. The institutions that decide what counts as infrastructure, what gets funded, what gets protected, and what gets offered a loan when the storm takes it out…they do not know.

And that ignorance is not neutral. It has a cost. It shapes what gets counted. What gets rebuilt. Who bears the weight of a crisis they did not create.

And that clock is ticking. Hurricane season starts June 1. Tick tock. Crick crack.

Next time wire bend, who know how the story go end?