Better Late: A Jamaican Internet Infrastructure Story

When the Internet goes down, everything stops.

Mobile banking fails. Patients lose access to telehealth. E-learning shutters. Tax systems go analog. Emergency coordination goes dark. Wantee wantee no gettee.

When Hurricane Melissa swept through Jamaica, the country had wanted resilient digital infrastructure for years. In the moment it needed it most, it didn’t have it.

The lesson was not new.

Trevor Forrest, Senior Advisor to Jamaica’s Minister without Portfolio for Science, Technology and Special Projects, had spent years arguing that Internet infrastructure is national security infrastructure, a foundational national asset, as critical as roads, ports, and power grids.

At CaribNOG 31, held in Kingston months after Melissa’s landfall, he sharpened the argument.

A well-designed cyberattack, he said, can produce the same impact as a natural disaster. The lights go out either way.

Local internet exchange infrastructure, he argued, is what keeps the Internet from going dark when the crisis hits.

Except that Jamaica has an IXP. It just wasn’t ready.

Gettee Gettee No Wantee The Jamaica Internet Exchange Point (JAIXP) was established in 2014, around the same time as GREX in Grenada. And then it stalled.

While Grenada built GREX into one of the region’s more mature exchanges, Jamaica’s did not develop into the multi-stakeholder model its founders envisioned.

The same help was there. The same partners showed up. Packet Clearing House donated the initial switch. Its Secretary General, Bill Woodcock, personally assisted with pre-launch advocacy.

But the Jamaican will failed to keep pace.

A decade later, Evona Channer of the Office of Utilities Regulation stood at CaribNOG 31 to formally relaunch JAIXP.

The replacement of the original switch—a milestone in the exchange’s renewal—came, she noted, through “the generosity of Packet Clearing House.”

The same organisation that showed up in 2014 was still there in 2026.

Forrest, who has been part of the JAIXP conversation since its founding, was also present for the relaunch. He stopped just short of a promise.

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

The switch has been replaced. But the people who planted this never left.

The next storm will come. The work, this time, is already underway.