Cuba Turns On Submarine Internet Cable

angry tapir writes "A change in Internet traffic patterns over the past week suggests that Cuba may have turned on a fiber-optic submarine cable that links it to the global Internet via Venezuela. Routing analyst firm Renesys noticed that the Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica began routing Internet traffic to Cuba's state telecommunications company, Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A. (ETECSA). The Internet traffic is flowing with significantly lower latencies than before, indicating the connection is not solely using the three satellite providers that Cuba has relied on in the past for connectivity."

Comments

Just ask

[AmiMoJo]

Just ask them if it is active. Don't speculate. They have no reason to hide it, and every reason to boast that their internet connections just got better.

The author seems to have mistaken Cuba for North Korea.

Re:Just ask

[vlm]

Just ask them if it is active. Don't speculate

Assuming their Venezuelan peer didn't connect to them via satellite and does now connect via fiber, it should be simple to log into your nearest BGP speaking router and/or check a looking glass web interface for the cuban ISP AS number and see if it now has a path via the fiber instead of / in addition to the path via the existing satellite providers.

That's how you "don't speculate". Is there a BGP path over that fiber or not?

Of course if the path won't change if all that changes is layer 1/layer 2 from satellite to fiber.

This is assuming Cuba has enough traffic to warrant being a "real" ISP with BGP peers and full routes. I suspect they do?

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Use this as a chance to end the embargo against Cuba. It has been 50 years, let's move on. If we can now trade with Burma and Vietnam, then why the hell should be still be fucking with Cuba?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

1)To get votes from the Cuban community from Miami.
2)To protect US corn farmers and corn syrup from imports of cane sugar from Cuba.

Re:Good

[Anne Thwacks]

3) To protect certain TV channels from the influx of good music

Re:Good

[ledow]

So the USSR is on the trade-embargoes list too? (Er... no... it's not).

The US itself put nuclear weapons in the EU in case of the USSR attacking, and although they are an "ally" to the EU, I don't see any of the former Russian states initiating embargoes with the EU countries or the US, now or in the past?

And where embargoes exist, or have existed since the Cold War, they are usually aimed purely at the thing you want to embargo (i.e. nuclear weapons, like the UK embargoed India). A blanket trade embargo is someone throwing their toys out of the pram, not a sensible real-world solution, and is usually only temporary until a government settles into power.

And the US-Cuba embargo was started in 1960. Most of the legislators who decided on the embargo aren't even around any more. My entire life was lived in that time, with nearly two decades to spare. Wars were fought and won.

The US is a playground bully that embargoes countries that don't play by its terms. It has little or no real-world relevance to their security, or anything else.

Cuba are about as much a threat to the US as Argentina is to UK. And, hell, technically we went to war with Argentina for an invasion of UK-owned islands in the intervening decades, fought it, declared peace and several decades later are being cautious about a potential re-occurrence. But we still don't even trade-embargo them.

And, technically, the embargo has NEVER been about that. It was about human rights, trade debts, and the nationalisation of US citizens' property in the country. The Missile Crisis came years later, and was resolved within days.

Let's punish countries for things they did up to 60+ years ago with their own allies that actually hurt no-one, and punish them even when the problem goes away. Because there'd be an AWFUL lot of countries up shit creek if we did that.

And, the thing is, nobody has ANY idea whose has missiles and where they could be aimed at nowadays. Nobody. Hell, that was the whole "WMD" farce in a nutshell - a false positive. And most modern weapons could take out anyone, anywhere, without warning. By the standards applied, the US should either a) invade Cuba or b) trade-embargo every country in the world. The threat was always the USSR, never Cuba itself.

Notice that no other countries embargo Cuba. Not even the US allies. That says a lot. And no country in the world has had an embargo in place for as long.

Re:Good

[Max_W]

It was widely noticed in Europe that as soon as goods and tourists stop crossing boarders - tanks and soldiers start to cross instead.

It is simple - one does not shoot his/her customers.

Re:Turn on?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't turn on a TV, you just supply electrical potential to certain components. And you don't start a car, you just start using certain electrical pathways that start using certain valves and motors to supply fuel, oxygen, and a periodic ignition source.

'Turn on' is a valid way to describe going online. From a systems and communications point of view, it isn't that much different from turning on a lightbulb (it just has a lot more components).

Re:VIVA LAS VEGAS !!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Las" is plural. I think you meant "La revolución".

Re:Turn on?

[rogueippacket]

Oddly enough, a lot of ISP's in North America actually monitor the traffic flowing to/from embargoed or troubled nations. Not necessarily deep inspection, but they do count the source/destination IP addresses and record the daily volumes.
Now, we need to consider traffic flowing out of Venezuela as another route to Cuba. It's fairly important if you peer with Telefonica directly, or if your job is to monitor this stuff.