Residents of Costa Rica might not be able to access the Internet on their desktop or mobile devices starting this Friday at 22:00 CST UTC/GMT -6 hours until 06:00 on Sunday. According to an announcement posted on the website of the Superintendency of Telecommunications (Spanish acronym: SUTEL), there may be a sharp decrease in broadband speeds, but intermittent service and complete outages may also be experienced at a national level.

 

The forewarning by the SUTEL is based on planned repairs to the Maya-1 Submarine Cable System, which is an important access point or major Internet backhaul portion for all major service providers in Costa Rica. In fact, the Maya-1 Consortium members in our country include: ICE, RSL Telecom and RACSA (now under ICE). In the United States, the Sprint Network Administration System describes this undersea cable as:

 

[A] Submarine Cable System providing service from Hollywood, Florida on the southern tip of the United States to Tolu, Colombia on the northern tip of South America. Utilizing Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) with Erbium-Doped-Fiber-Amplifier (EDFA) technology, MAYA-1 has a system capacity of 82.5 Gbps. It is a collapsed SDH ring system with semi-passive branching units and has a total length of 4400 km. It provides service to the United States, Mexico, Honduras, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia.

 

The maintenance procedures will include installation of new control component, software upgrades, replacement of damaged cable segments in excess of 1.2 km underwater. This cable was installed in the year 2000 and it upgraded the national Internet infrastructure to 155 Mbps.

 

Internet users in Costa Rica have quickly voiced their displeasure by taking to social media and making fun of the already deficient Internet service in Costa Rica. Some of the comments thus far include:

 

• So this means business as usual?
• I already get reduced speeds and intermittent service. I don’t think I will be able to tell the difference this weekend.
• It really can’t get any worse.
• Everyone logs in during the weekend and overloads the network anyway, that’s why I only check my email at around 4 in the morning from Tuesday to Thursday.