Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Cuba Connecting Universities With Fiber

Posted by samzenpus on from the if-you-build-it-they-will-type dept.

lpress writes: Two Cuban universities have fiber links and fiber connections will be available to all Cuban universities in January 2016. One of the currently connected universities is in the west, near Havana (satellite ground station) and one in the east, near the undersea cable landing. Cuba will use Chinese equipment for DSL to the home and Wifi access points.

33 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Back Door by pubwvj · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is this the same Chinese country that is building back doors into networking and computer equipment so they can later take it over as described in a previous article? Seems everyone's hip to this fun game and playing it out.

    1. Re:Back Door by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 2

      That, and the fact that they're deploying long ago obsoleted last mile technology (DSL), I doubt their infrastructure will be any kind of marvel. One would think that an all new deployment would be at least kind of modern.

    2. Re:Back Door by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Reason for DSL is two-fold.

      1. Cuba deployment needs to be CHEAP
      2. See #1

      Cuba doesn't have foreign cash to burn on Internet. They are probably using Chinese gear simply because they got good deal. And you know, it's kind of difficult to buy things from US if US still has their embargo on.

    3. Re:Back Door by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Is this the same Chinese country...?

      No, this is a Scottish Chinese country hidden away in the hills of Bavaria.

    4. Re:Back Door by DigiShaman · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm guessing equipment purchased on the used market. Cuba's still pretty poor right now. Thanks to Castro and his little shit-fit revolution, he drove that nation into the ground via COMMUNISM! And no, Cuba's survival didn't depend on trading with America; or the lack of in this case. The financial wounds were self-inflicted by Cuba for Cuba. It truly is a sad story and need not have happened.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    5. Re:Back Door by AK+Marc · · Score: 1, Informative

      You mean, thanks to the USA embargo, where force and threat of force to keep the smaller nation down harmed the smaller nation, and stunted its growth?

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    6. Re:Back Door by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      Cuba would rather have Chinese backdoors than the US/French/Israeli backdoors.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    7. Re:Back Door by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 1

      What would the US embargo have done that the Iron Curtain wouldn't have already done anyways?

    8. Re:Back Door by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Cuba is using Chinese gear because after the collapse of the Soviet Union, whom were sending a $20 Billion check every year, that cash went to zero, sending the
      cuban economy into a tailspin. The 90's were tough on Cuba, but they eventually found new trading partners. When I was there five years ago, instead of Soviet-era Lada's there were new and quite nice Chinese cars and motorcycles. I went from the airport to my hotel in a brand new Chinese made bus, and it was nicer than any bus I've seen in North America. The Cubans are buying Chinese data gear because they while the embargo prevented US goods, and the Russians gone, the Chinese have stepped in and Chinese goods are everywhere.

    9. Re:Back Door by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This is a very persistent rumour.

      But unlike equipment from the US, no equipment has been caught in the act.

    10. Re:Back Door by citizenr · · Score: 2

      Is this the same Chinese country that is building back doors into networking and computer equipment so they can later

      You mean Cisco and US? No I dont think its this one.

      --
      Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
    11. Re:Back Door by AK+Marc · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It may have only resulted in a nicer palace for Castro, but the embargo on Cuban tobacco helped make the country poor. We'll never know what they would have done with the money. The evil of the US trumped the evil of Castro.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    12. Re:Back Door by lkcl · · Score: 1

      Is this the same Chinese country that is building back doors into networking and computer equipment so they can later take it over as described in a previous article?

      no because they forgot to ship it via the USA to have the backdoors installed.

    13. Re:Back Door by Feral+Nerd · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I'm guessing equipment purchased on the used market. Cuba's still pretty poor right now. Thanks to Castro and his little shit-fit revolution, he drove that nation into the ground via COMMUNISM! And no, Cuba's survival didn't depend on trading with America; or the lack of in this case. The financial wounds were self-inflicted by Cuba for Cuba. It truly is a sad story and need not have happened.

      You are trolling. Take the deeply held beliefs of the GOP+Tea Party and shout them from the roof top in a relatively liberal heavy crowd like slashdot and watch the sparks fly. At least it's a clever troll I'll give you that so I'll bite. Can some GOP voting admirer of the Cuba embargo please tell me what is the purpose of maintaining it 30 years after the end of the cold war? Do yoy really think the Cubans yearn to have the Batista elite that fled to Miami back? Rest assured that most of them don't. I've been there and my impression was that Cubans may want a better life but they don't want their island to bcome America's whorehouse again. You can try to tell me the Castros are a cruel dictatorship that killed a bunch of people and you'd me right. But then so are some of the USA's most trusted friends aroud the world who have regularly been recieved in the White House for decades with open arms by Democrat and Republican presidents alike. The Cuba embargo is a stupid anachronism, all it does in make an international laughing stock out of GOP senators and leaders who block the lifting of the Cuba embargo. This is especially true since at the same time these politicians are maintaining the embargo they are whoring for favors with Saudi oil princes who are functionaries in an athoritarian theocracy and some of whom financed the Iraq insurgency and are now bankrolling ISIL.

    14. Re:Back Door by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You weren't there. That "shitfit" was kicking out Batista, a murderous, corrupt Mafia collaborating drug and gambling and crime cartel with rightwing death squads, right on the US doorstep. Great place to go for richer US tourists to spend money and buy prostitutes and drugs, pretty good place if you were rich and friendly with the government, bad, bad place to be poor. It was "trickle down economics" at its worst.

      Castro refused to cooperate with the mafia, or with US cold war imperial policy, and refused to return the property and factories his government nationalized. Then the US tried to invade the country, and failed miserably.So that little "shitfit revolution" played the Russians off against the USA, successfully, for over *30 years* and kept their economy afloat and played political judo with the Western world.

      Now? They're still surviving and making do. They're quite poor, mainly because the first round of Cuban expatriates in Miami have blocked every reconciliation attempt since the 1960's, and so has the US sugar and tobacco industries, which benefit profoundly from the lack of competition.

    15. Re:Back Door by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      Oh bullshit!. They had the ENTIRE SOUTH AMERICA to trade with! But assuming for a moment you're correct (which you're not) let this be a lesson not to be a neighbor and side with an evil regime such as the USSR.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    16. Re:Back Door by DigiShaman · · Score: 2

      "I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I will be a Marxist-Leninist until the last days of my life" - Fidel Castro (Dec 2, 1961)

      I propose the immediate launching of a nuclear strike on the United States. The Cuban people are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the destruction of imperialism and the victory of world revolution. - Fidel Castro (Oct, 23, 1992, as quoted in NY Times)

      Forbes estimates Castro has a net worth between 550 million and 900 million dollars.

      So yeah, keep wearing that Che Guevara T-Shirt there buddy.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    17. Re:Back Door by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      Oh bullshit!. They had the ENTIRE SOUTH AMERICA to trade with!

      Which itself has spent much of that interval being about as economically advanced as Cuba itself is.

      I still contend that the ultimate destruction of the Castro regime won't occur until Americans are free to come in and corrupt them again.

    18. Re:Back Door by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 1

      You mean, thanks to the USA embargo, where force and threat of force to keep the smaller nation down harmed the smaller nation, and stunted its growth?

      What, you somehow believe that the USA is the ONLY country that could possibly have traded with Cuba over the last half century? Let me give you a hint: everyone in the world except the USA could still trade with Cuba.

      Yes, they could still sell their tobacco. And run their resort hotels and casinos. And their 14-year-old hookers....

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    19. Re:Back Door by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 2

      Despite all that, once Castro came to power, he used the US embargo as an eternal excuse to keep the country just as poor as it was beforehand.

      I'll expand on what Digi pointed out - the entire world can trade with Cuba, except one country, and Cuba can't figure out how to have a good economy. It isn't the embargo one one single country that is hurting them, as even Raúl Castro admitted a few years ago.

      --
      If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
    20. Re:Back Door by ultranova · · Score: 1

      Can some GOP voting admirer of the Cuba embargo please tell me what is the purpose of maintaining it 30 years after the end of the cold war? Do yoy really think the Cubans yearn to have the Batista elite that fled to Miami back?

      The obvious answer is: to get the vote of that Batista elite.

      A deeper reason is likely that, no matter what it cost it, Cuba is a small country that succesfully defied the USA and went its own way. Empires can be unbelievably petty sometimes. And the ideologies riding them have all the tender neighbourly love of religious fanaticism without even the hypothetical possibility of judgement to curb the worst excesses. Those ideologies need to see any dissenters brought low to secure themselves, to kill off even the very idea that there might be a workable alternative. Because as soon as there is, their offers are no longer ones you can't refuse. Hence the continued attempts to demonize Communism, despite it being unlikely any idea could had succeeded any better in the broken ruins of Tsarist Russia. Burger-flippers are already talking about a living wage; imagine if they cast off the idea that they're less valuable than Donald Trump or Darl McBride and started demanding an actual fair share rather than beg for a bit more table scraps.

      The GOP is heavily invested in both US national pride and state religion (Capitalism), and Cuba pissed on both.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    21. Re:Back Door by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 1

      That doesn't make sense at all, because technologically Cuba is presently residing in the early 1960s, which is about when its ties with the US ended. Also Cuba didn't begin to see famine until after that point as well.

  2. Good luck! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Good luck getting IP addresses, Cuba!

    1. Re:Good luck! by MrDoh! · · Score: 1

      How many will they need? can they just use 192.168.x.x for most stuff and have a giant NAT to route/censor stuff through? Why would they want anyone outside connecting up to servers inside the country? or... Once Starbucks sets up, they'll hop onto their wifi and keep sharing that out.

      --
      Waiting for an amusing sig.
  3. How about Cisco and NSA backdoor? by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 1

    The link - http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:How about Cisco and NSA backdoor? by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 2

      That's not a Cisco backdoor.

      That's a NSA backdoor the NSA installed by intercepting the units and installing their own hardware.

      This is significantly different than a backdoor from the manufacturer which would be in all devices. That is if indeed that does exist in Huawei equipment. The Western media reports so breathlessly on Chinese companies that it's hard to tell what has basis in fact and what is just rumor.

      --
      http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
  4. Not really unique by SeaFox · · Score: 1

    Cuba will use Chinese equipment for DSL to the home and Wifi access points.

    I think we can all say that our DSL and wifi equipment is Chinese in origin. ;)

  5. Re:They'll have plenty of fiber by MacTO · · Score: 1

    Did you drink a bit too much of the kool-aid? Cuba may not be a free nation, yet there are far worse nations that still allow access to the Internet. Monitored and censored, sure. Yet that hardly means that they don't allow data onto the "fibre". They still want data that serves the interest of the state. For the most part, they don't care about data that isn't a threat to the state.

  6. Awesome! by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Now all they need is a computer!

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  7. They may install twisted pair runs? by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 1

    Please don't install 2M new twisted pair runs. This is an awful idea. Fiber is cheap. Coax is pretty cheap. And both are far faster and more flexible than twisted pair.

    What twisted pair is really good for (outside of the house) wireless is good at too. So install something better if you really want to upgrade versus just running 4G service.

    Do not install new DSL wires. It'd be a tragedy.

    --
    http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
    1. Re:They may install twisted pair runs? by jratcliffe · · Score: 1

      Agreed. It would be crazy at this stage to be pulling new twisted pair copper. I get why you'd want to use DSL and leverage the twisted pair that's there (cheap solution), but not why you'd want to add new copper lines.

  8. What does "connecting" mean? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 1

    Does it mean what it means to normal sane people? Or it means what the Verizon lawyers say it means?

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  9. How long till the ssh attacks start coming... by CSG_SurferDude · · Score: 1

    So how long until http://longtail.it.marist.edu/ starts seeing and categorizing SSH Brute Force attacks from Cuba?

    --

    LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!