At least for the neighboring country (Nicaragua) it's like that.
Sometimes the reference points are not even there anymore, as in the case of some old buildings destroyed in the Managua earthquake in '72
This is pure speculation - I have no prove.
I believe is also due to the target buyer: afaik the biggest adopters are municipalities and not general consumers.
If we are talking about the radio spectrum: Not much - other than the threat of the regulators showing up at your doorsteps after they found you with a van. If you are talking about the backbone so to say, it's not such a big Issue. The original packet-forwarder sends "json" over UDP. If you are using a packet-forwarder by one of the network operators, some of them are using MQTT (IP/TCP) as the transport.
Some gateways let you filter by network_id, this will not stop someone from pulliting/disrupting the radio spectrum, but it will stop your gateway from relaying those packets to your network-server.
My first OpenStack install was on a bunch of VMs. Got that to run following the official documentation. Got enough people interested in it, that I was "allowed" to salvage whatever hardware I could find and put in a Rack.
Getting Neutron to work was a head first intro to networks and in the end I had to learn how to configure actual network hardware.
After adding Ceph on top of old spinning disk, watching them die one after the other and the cluster was still up with performance not worst than the IBM-Stuff we were paying for gave me warm-fuzzy feelings.
Thanks to Triple-O, Fuel and most of the other "installers" at that time I learned that - the "big guys" don't know what they are doing either ;-)
At the end of the day, it took the "mystical" out of the cloud, and for Junior me that was good - it also saved me from the path management wanted me to go: Sharepoint developer/admin.
I learned about them on my previous job. It's rather easy to cluster and the Web-Hooks are super easy to get started with.
I don't know Erlang myself, but looking at the code and comparing it to some of the Java solutions, it seemed well structured and easier to understand/modify if I wanted to. The only "Issue" I have with it right now, is the "custom OpenSource license" they have.
The funny thing with envoy is that you can take the source of the authz service and build your own auth-mechanism for other protocols. We are doing that for MQTT