Maduro’s Land of Darkness: documenting a month of degradation with remote, alternative data
Many know of Venezuela’s month of crippling electricity outages, but the granular details are worth absorbing.
Using remotely collected, alternative data, we can begin to document the month of darkness in more detail.
Here, we estimate the extent of infrastructure degradation at 12 important sub-national municipios using data from the Monash University IP Observatory (@IP_Observatory).
Our methodology uses the most basic internet messaging protocol, widely used billions of times a day to establish routes for your email, tweet, or share.
By sampling the online or offline status of a large sample of known geo-located internet addresses (IPs) in each municipio, we are able to build up a national, or sub-national picture of the electricity and internet infrastructure in near real time.
The national view
Nationally, Venezuela has endured 7 major outage events beginning at around 5pm on the 7th March (indicated in panel A, below). From a baseline of around 90% connectivity, the average index we obtain from a week of unaffected measurements in early February, the two major outages on the 7th and 26th took national connectivity below 6%.
Recovery in both cases was protracted, and interrupted by significant set-backs.
Documenting the dark times at sub-national level
Whilst the national picture is dismal enough, diving deeper to the sub-national level reveals the true impact of these outages.
In the second panel (B, above), we use our statistical anomaly detector to mark in black on the timeline where any one of 12 important municipios suffered a significant degradation to their connectivity.
What the figure immediately reveals is the grinding, slow recovery to ‘normal’ experienced by a majority of the municipios in the sample. Whereas an outage of more than a few minutes is considered ‘major’ in a modern economy, the first outage caused degraded connectivity for an average of 5 days.
Urdaneta (Miranda state), on the other hand, we estimate endured a mind-boggling degradation period of 253 hours, from 8pm, 7 March to 9am, 18 March, 10.5 days later. It is truly impossible to imagine the impact of this kind of degradation on the ground.
Indeed, if we tally up the total periods of degradation affecting each municipio since 7 March, we find eight municipios affected for more than 10 days, and two (Girardot, Aragua state; Libertador, Distrito Capital state) affected for more than 16 days.
Tallies for all municipios are provided to the right of the timelines in panel B.
To be clear, our statistical detector is not measuring complete outages in these locations, but rather, periods of anomalous connectivity —representing smaller or larger pockets of the region with no connectivity, or intermittent service affecting many households, or a combination of both.
What of the future, Dark April?
Panel A, at national level, shows the nation reaching up towards normal connectivity. Panel B, tells the richer story that a number of significant areas are still struggling with degraded infrastructure.
Our latest national reading, at 5am, 4th April 2019 local time in Venezuela, just a couple of hours ago, shows a connectivity index of 77.3.
The longest that Venezuela has been able to keep the lights on at that level since March 7 was a precious 13 days.
But of course, it isn’t just about the lights. When the power goes down, Venezuelans lose access to a fundamental human right: their online freedom.
At a time such as this, that freedom is at a premium.
Let’s hope April is a month of light in Venezuela, in all senses.
The mission of the Monash University IP Observatory — ‘internet insights for social good’ — is to monitor the availability and quality of the Internet during critical events such as elections, natural disasters or conflict to provide. The observatory was founded by Klaus Ackermann, lecturer in Econometrics and Business Statistics, and Simon Angus, and Paul Raschky, Associate Professors in Economics. The observatory is a project of SoDa Laboratories at the Monash Business School, and tweets @IP_Observatory.
