Summary

  • ARIN created a Caribbean outreach post for Bevil Wooding in August 2017. The year's hurricanes then made network resilience and local operating capacity immediate subjects of that work.
  • By April 2018 he reported events in four countries with more than 200 participants. In 2025 he described connecting agencies and people during hurricane seasons, while a Jamaican ISP participant asked for more direct engagement.

The registry's address book met the weather

At an ARIN meeting in 2025, a participant asked what the registry could do for networks in a natural disaster. CEO John Curran's answer was practical: operators usually reroute deployed infrastructure with the numbers they already hold; ARIN's strongest work is building resilience before the emergency. Then Bevil Wooding added a less technical line item. Each hurricane season, he said, ARIN helps connect agencies and individuals who can assist, including outside its formal agreements. It sounded like an address book. In a crisis, that can be a serious piece of infrastructure.

Wooding's job had been newly created in August 2017. ARIN charged its Caribbean Outreach Liaison with explaining registry services, bringing more Caribbean voices into policy work and strengthening local relationships. The next months gave those broad verbs a sharp setting. In a 2018 article for ARIN, Wooding counted six hurricanes across the region in 2017. Irma and Maria directly struck ten Caribbean countries; Barbuda and Dominica went entirely offline. He identified weak telecom networks, policy gaps and too few skilled people as problems exposed by the storms.

The first response Wooding could document was organised learning. At ARIN 41 in April 2018, he reported visiting four countries and drawing more than 200 people to events. The conversations kept returning to network resilience, autonomous networks, IPv6, security and technical training. ARIN worked with CaribNOG, the Caribbean Telecommunications Union and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States for follow-on work; Wooding said there was an agreement with the latter on resilience. The point of a locally autonomous network is plain enough after a storm: fewer critical paths depend on a distant decision or a single fragile route.

Seven years later, the 2025 meeting transcript offered a useful check on the switchboard. A Jamaican ISP participant said that, beyond CaribNOG, they saw little direct engagement with their network. Wooding answered that ARIN had a programme of activities, took workshop requests and was seeking new contacts with ISPs while focusing on less served territories. Both statements belong in the story. A regional liaison can build bridges; an operator still has to find the entrance.

Wooding's ARIN profile now lists him as Director of Caribbean Affairs and as a leader in CaribNOG and CarPIF. The titles explain access. The 2018 turnout, the partnership record and that pointed 2025 question show the actual assignment: convert contacts into prepared local networks, and keep checking who has been left out of the conversation.