After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico’s Internet Problems Go from Bad to Worse
Sandra Rodriguez was on WAPA radio in Puerto Rico on September 21, 2017––the day after Hurricane Maria tore through the archipelago, leading to thousands of excess deaths and millions of others in the quiet dark.
“I can tell you about people who called my radio show: ‘Help, my house is filling up with water!’” Rodriguez, a journalist, said. “And the line would go dead.” This July, speaking in a brave, matter-of-fact voice, she talked about suffering and demanded accountability with a kind of courage that she said took root after the “terrible agony” that was Hurricane Maria.
“I’m not talking about dollars and cents,” she said. “We’re talking about humans of flesh and bone [who died] because of telecommunications, because you couldn’t pick up the phone or message someone.”
A year has passed since Hurricanes Maria and Irma, but the effects of these storms on telecommunications infrastructure persist. Phone calls drop, power sometimes vanishes completely, and, as our investigation found, internet speeds have yet to fully recover, leaving hundreds of thousands of people with speeds 10 times slower than the average on the continental United States.
Many of these issues have long histories. While towers and communication lines were torn apart by the force of lashing winds and rain, slow and unequal internet has long plagued Puerto Rico and its economy. Tech commenters on Puerto Rico have said internet issues have starved nascent tech, video game, and video industries: Obed Borrero, a tech journalist at Virtualizate, wonders, “Are we condemned to be an island for tourism alone?”
By analyzing more than 250,000 Measurement Lab internet speed tests in Puerto Rico from 2009 to the present, NOVA Next confirmed what people in Puerto Rico long maintained: Hurricane Maria hit an archipelago whose internet speeds had only recently started improving after a long period of slow, consistently poor service.
Between 2009 and 2016, internet speeds in Puerto Rico remained largely the same. In contrast, during the same seven-year period, they nearly doubled on the mainland. In 2016, the stagnation ended as Puerto Rico’s average download speed tripled from 2 megabytes per second (Mbps) to over 6 Mbps. Speeds continued to increase through September 2017, taking off at an unprecedented rate.
But right then, with internet speeds at their peak, Hurricane Maria hit. Average internet speed plummeted, falling below 3 Mbps––for those lucky enough to have internet at all. “It was like we returned 80 years into the past,” Borrero said. Internet speeds didn’t approach their pre-storm levels until August 2018.
Even the seemingly unequivocal good of internet improvement came at a cost. Improvements in 2016 and 2017 resulted in greater inequality across the island in internet speed, one of the few things unchanged by Maria. This June, the 25% of users with the slowest internet speeds had speeds below 1.5 Mbps—less than the 2Mbps minimum Skype recommends for a five-person video conference, and half the recommended speed for SD video on Netflix. On the other hand, the fastest 25% saw speeds approaching 10 Mbps, a speed comparable to those on the mainland.
The FCC Before the Storm
Even before Hurricane Irma hit in early September of 2017, Rodriguez could see a unique and dangerous chaos forming in Puerto Rico.
At 2:23 am on September 5, 2017, just hours before over one million Puerto Ricans were pushed into disconnected darkness, Rodriguez wrote a blog entry asking: “What happens if Hurricane Irma leaves you without internet, without radio, without TV, and without a phone? Is Puerto Rico prepared to endure a total lack of communication?” In it, she lamented the proliferation of new radio towers over the improvement of old ones, the danger of power and telecommunications cables often left suspended in mid-air instead of buried underground, and questioned the government’s ability to communicate during an emergency. A comment on her entry, written October 10, 2017, says it’s as though Rodriguez traveled back in time to write the post.
But on September 5, the Puerto Rican government couldn’t have addressed Rodriguez’s questions—it was still waiting on the Federal Communications Commission. The archipelago had incomplete knowledge as to whether the license for its public services radio band—the one used by emergency management agencies of all 78 municipalities, seven regional emergency management agencies, the Department of Public Transportation and Public Work, the Coast Guard, the National Guard, the Weather Service, and the Department of Housing—would be renewed, according to FCC filings and internal FCC documents shared with NOVA Next by government employees.
Because of how the FCC regulates local radio stations, the use license for the emergency station WPTZ852 expired in July 2017. The FCC sent “Public Safety Renewal” emails to the government of Puerto Rico in February, March, April, and May 2017 with reminders to no avail, but sent no renewal emails after the expiration. Luis Arocho, Puerto Rico’s CIO of three years, gave no comments to NOVA Next.
On August 30, 2017, Irma developed from a tropical wave near Cape Verde into a hurricane, placing Puerto Ricans in danger. The following day, Abner Gomez Cortes, Executive Director of the Puerto Rican Emergency Management Authority, contacted the FCC to renew the expired WPTZ852 license. In his petition, he claimed that the renewal reminders were “never received by appropriate personnel.” August became September––and Hurricane Irma hit Puerto Rico on September 6. Fifteen days later, Hurricane Maria struck. A response from the FCC never came.
Then, on September 22, 2017––two full days after Hurricane Maria––the FCC approved the application because dismissal would be “unduly harsh and contrary to public interest.” In that decision, the FCC “reiterated” that “a licensee will not be afforded special consideration when it fails to file a timely renewal application simply because it engages in public safety activities.”
But the license wasn’t immediately renewed after the decision. Photos of FCC software that track the status of radio licenses (see below) show that while the FCC approved the request on the 22nd, the license wasn’t renewed until September 25, nearly a week after Hurricane Maria. An FCC official, who wishes to remain anonymous, explained that because September 22nd was a Friday, the renewal would not take effect until the following business day.
Emily M. Reigart reported a similar story for Radioworld in April 2017. For 13, 14, and 17 years, respectively, WAPA Radio was licensed to use AM signal boosters in three territories of Puerto Rico, Arecibo, Aguadilla, and Mayagüez, allowing them to broadcast from San Juan and Ponce to more rural parts of Puerto Rico.
Those broadcasts provided the only contact many Puerto Ricans had during the storm. WAPA radio was the only station to broadcast continuously throughout Hurricane Maria, and Rodriguez’ conversation with the radio caller that flooding cut short happened on WAPA radio.
Shortly after the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, the FCC scheduled the three WAPA stations for shutdown and their radio call signs for deletion, claiming the licenses had been temporary. After a failed appeal in April 2017, the stations disappeared in May.
Puerto Rico Before the Storm
Usually, with money and attention, the contributing elements of calamity can be addressed. That didn’t happen in Puerto Rico.
Telecom companies had found ways to provide high-speed internet using “ancient networks of copper around the island,” which Javier Rua, the president of the Puerto Rican telecommunications authority Junta Reglamentadora de Telecommunicaciones (JRT) from 2013 to 2017 calls “basically a 19th century technology.” In that frugality is ingenious engineering. But ancient networks suspended in mid-air were susceptible to the sharp winds and rain of the 2017 hurricane season.
Even new cables were put at risk by telecommunications companies. By overburdening existing telephone poles instead of building more, telephone poles were more vulnerable––their heavy tops leading to collapse in Maria’s wake.
The number of fiber-optic cables on telephone poles weakened the poles’ resistance to wind, former PREPA Executive Director Josue Colon told Voice of America. While the usual wind load capacity of those poles is 140-155 mph—resistance approaching Hurricane Maria’s fastest gales—when over-encumbered with telecom property, their capacity fell well below the maximum speeds to 90-105 mph.
While telecommunications companies reported investing nearly $4 billion in Puerto Rico from 2004 to 2015, their investments weren’t always storm-resilient. And this infrastructure drew money from a pool that had been rapidly shrinking since the mid-2000s.
For many years, Puerto Rico experienced tax cuts the Tax Foundation describes as “making investment in Puerto Rico artificially attractive… [leaving] the island vulnerable to a crash if the tax provisions were ever to be repealed.” In 2006, those cuts were finally rolled back.
Tax cuts made government revenues in Puerto Rico plummet, leading the archipelago to issue debt, also known as bonds, to survive. At the time, money-minded investors bought eagerly because a cadre of unique laws made Puerto Rican debt especially profitable to own. But in 2014, the value of the debt was downgraded, leading to a fire sale of bonds to “vulture funds” that swept in like loan sharks to buy debt at steep discounts.
To deal with the economic crisis these policies and choices created, Congress appointed an unelected financial oversight board to control Puerto Rico’s budget, using that power to impose tight austerity.
The oversight arrangement is “administration without representation,” Dr. Juan Guisti-Cordero of the University of Puerto Rico said. “The Thirteen Colonies had taxation without representation but they weren’t run by Great Britain. Britain had power over the Colonies, but it didn’t have nearly the power and the presence the U.S. has over Puerto Rico. We have no taxation. but we have administration in almost every conceivable aspect of our lives,” Guisti-Cordero said. “We’re not taxed, but we’re administered, which is something a lot worse.”
With every check the fiscal control board canceled, and every penny creditors plucked from Puerto Rican pockets, the pool of money and incentives for resilient internet improvements shrank. The stagnation of Puerto Rico’s internet is inseparable from the larger economic forces battering the Commonwealth.
Another is many Puerto Ricans’ inability to afford the internet they’re offered. A 2016 GSMA Intelligence Survey on Mobile Internet in Latin America and the Caribbean found that only 1.3 million of the 3.5 million Puerto Ricans with access to high-speed broadband subscribed to it. One-third of Puerto Ricans who didn’t subscribe cited price as a major reason why.
These figures also likely underestimate how cost keeps Puerto Ricans from high-speed internet. The poorest 40% of the population pay nearly one-fifth of their income to get mobile broadband. On the other hand, the richest 20% pay only a 2% sliver of their income for fast mobile internet.
“Somebody has to be accountable,” Rodriguez stressed, describing––with the exception of T-Mobile––telecom companies that wouldn’t “show their face” and a government that pointed fingers back at industry. Between those companies and the government stand 3.1 million Puerto Ricans––each an American citizen by law, even if official treatment doesn’t always show it.
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