Summary

  • According to the project lead and later histories, Hurricane Andrew damaged Homestead’s receiving antennas and delayed Costa Rica’s planned Internet connection by several months.
  • UCR connected about a dozen university nodes through the NSF point of presence at Homestead on 26 January 1993. A contemporary notice counted 10; neither number proves national or household access.

Costa Rica’s first Internet route depended on a vulnerable far end. A 64 kbps satellite path was planned between the University of Costa Rica (UCR) and an Internet point of presence in Homestead, Florida. The connection also relied on the onward route from that teleport to the US research backbone. On 24 August 1992 Hurricane Andrew crossed South Florida and damaged Homestead’s receiving antennas. The connection plans were delayed for months.

Guy de Téramond, who led the UCR project, recounts the damage; later histories by Ignacio Siles repeat it. Their chronology needs care. De Téramond says his team was ready to establish the 64 kbps link in October 1992, after the storm. The available sources do not date the antenna repairs or explain every step between damage and service. They support a delay and a January connection, not a detailed recovery timeline. A separate account of NSF international connectivity describes a Sprint T-1 between Homestead and Washington that was due shortly before Andrew. That was another circuit; it must not be folded into Costa Rica’s satellite path.

UCR had previously joined BITNET, a distinct academic network, and used a gateway for international email. That was connectivity, but not the country’s first Internet link. On 26 January 1993, roughly a dozen nodes in UCR’s Network Unit, Computer Center, Schools of Geology and Physics were connected at 64 kbps. The path used NSF’s Homestead point of presence and a Cisco IGS router loaned by the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A 1 February contemporary notice says 10 nodes. Keep both counts attributed rather than inventing a single exact number.

The CRNet national research-network project proceeded alongside this international connection. The evidence does not show every planned institution online that day or households able to subscribe. This is a story about one operational dependency: a national research initiative could be prepared locally while a damaged receiving site thousands of kilometres away delayed the usable route. It does not establish a nationwide outage, public availability, measured throughput beyond the circuit’s nominal rate or the exact length of repairs.

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