Can Cuba Skip Cell Phone Connectivity?

lpress writes: Cuba has a second generation cellular network and Internet access is limited to about 5% of the population via work and school accounts and (mostly dial up) access in a few homes, so it was big news when they rolled out 35 public WiFi hotspots. Can they expand this public WiFi and skip 3G and 4G cell infrastructure until 5G equipment is available in about five years? By then, the US trade embargo will be gone, the Cuban economy will be improved and 5G and other wireless technologies will be available. Will they even need cell phone capability by then? The linked post has some interesting musings that apply to places other than Cuba, as well.

Comments

Re:People have to be careful

[ultranova]

At any price the world can only produce so many hand made sports cars built in some Italian factory. There's a limit. And the high ticket price of such things is largely a rationing system.

True but meaningless. The world can produce enough cars for everyone. It can even produce enough sport cars for everyone. The attributes "hand made" and "built in some Italian factory" are slapped on to turn an otherwise ordinary product into a status symbol, who's defining feature is exclusiveness. It has no consequences for people who simply want to get from point A to point B fast and thus need a (fast) car.

In other words, "hand made sports cars built in some Italian factory" are primarily the modern equivalent of Imperial Purple of ancient Rome: they advertize their owner's social position. They simply happen to have some utility as cars as well.

What this all means is that the economics of hand made sports cars have nothing to do with economics of communications. Everyone can't be richer than everyone else, but even the poorest person in a country could be well wealthy enough to have a 100 Mbit Internet connection on their cellphone. And in fact the wealthier they are, the more likely they are to participate in the economy, politics, culture etc. in a productive manner; for example this discussion is more likely to produce good ideas and expose bad ones as such than if all of us sat on a carboard box somewhere and tried to forget our growling stomachs.

Point is that Cuba can't sustainably provide more communication to the people than the people either want or can pay for.

It can, however, change the relative costs of various options to steer development away from local optimum towards true optimum, or even infinity. "Cost" here can involve either money, punishments for undesirable behaviour, or extending willpower to resist indoctrination. Theoretically, this can lead to better outcome due to planning ahead of time and thus having better coordination; in practice, this planning needs to be done by someone, and that someone is chosen from candidates filtered and heavily targeted by various interest's propaganda, leading to the reality-disconnected insanity we see in politicians and other powerful people all the time.

Luckily, better communications also make untrue indoctrination harder to maintain. There's a reason why, for example, religious fundamentalists oppose - either via terror like in Afghanistan or via sabotage like in the US - education: it might not destroy the student's faith in God, but sure does destroy the illusion that the group's dogma is God's will. It's why censorship is nearly synonymous with tyranny, and why everyone who's nation is building national firewalls or other such infrastructure can be certain there's nasty surprises in store. If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, after all.