After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico’s Internet Problems Go from Bad to Worse

Using Measurement Lab data, OTI's Nick Thieme wrote for PBS about the state of Puerto Rico's internet and telecommunication infrastructure a year after Hurricanes Maria and Irma.

A year after Hurricanes Maria and Irma, telecommunications infrastructure problems persist. Phone calls drop and power sometimes vanishes completely. And 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.

By analyzing more than 250,000 Measurement Lab internet speed tests in Puerto Rico from 2009 to the present, NOVA confirmed what people in Puerto Rico have known implicitly for a long time: Hurricane Maria hit an island whose internet speeds had only recently started improving.