You Won't Find Any Problems Getting A Good Cigar In Cuba But You Will have To Wait A Long Time For A Google Response

Internet access in Cuba has gotten far better in the last year, thanks in large part to thawing relations between Cuba's government and the U.S. 

In the case of a censorship-heavy, technology-impaired regime, though, "better" doesn't necessarily mean good.

Northwestern engineering professor Fabián E. Bustamante and graduate student Zachary Bischof decided to quantify the performance of Cuban internet connections, and found them "perhaps even worse than they expected," with regards to routing in particular.

 Reader TheSync writes with this excerpt:

During their study, Bustamante and Bischof found that when a person in Havana searched for a topic on Google, for example, the request traveled through the marine cable to Venezuela, then through another marine cable to the United States, and finally landed at a Google server in Dallas, Texas.

 When the search results traveled back, it went to Miami, Florida, up to the satellite, and then back to Cuba.

 While the information out of Cuba took 60-70 milliseconds, it took a whopping 270 milliseconds to travel back.