Better Late: A Jamaican Internet Infrastructure Story

When the Internet goes down, everything stops.

Mobile banking freezes. Tax systems shutter. Patients’ telehealth stalls. E-learning fails. Emergency coordination goes dark. Wantee wantee, cyah gettee.

When Hurricane Melissa swept through Jamaica, the country had wanted resilient digital infrastructure for years. Wantee wantee, cyah gettee.

The lesson wasn’t new.
 Bevil Wooding, co-founder of the Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG), had been saying it for years: Internet exchange points are the foundation on which regional network resilience depends.

Trevor Forrest had also spent years arguing that Internet infrastructure is national security infrastructure. A foundational national asset, he said. As critical as roads, ports, and power grids.

At CaribNOG 31, held in Kingston a few months after Melissa’s landfall, Forrest was speaking as Senior Advisor to Jamaica’s Minister without Portfolio for Science, Technology and Special Projects. Different title, same message. In fact, 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, not if, the crisis hits.

Except that Jamaica has an internet exchange point.

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 leg failed to keep pace. Gettee gettee, no wantee.

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. This time, he chose his words carefully.

“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.