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The Telecommunications Ball Is Now In Cuba's Court
lpress writes: The FCC has dropped Cuba from its exclusion list (PDF), so there are now no restrictions on U.S. telecom company dealings with ETECSA, the Cuban government telecommunication monopoly, or any other Cuban organization. Last week the U.S. sent its second high-level telecommunication delegation to Cuba. The delegates were FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and other government officials plus representatives of Cisco, Comcast, and Ericsson. Some of the news: there are at least 6 proposals for an undersea cable between Havana and Florida; Cisco has proposed a Network Academy at Cuba's leading computer science university (Chinese infrastructure dominates today); 4G mobile connectivity was discussed and Google was conspicuously absent. The time for Cuba to act is now — while President Obama is still in office.
I guess trump will build a Great Physical Wall on the boarder of Mexico and a Great Firewall on the boarder of Cuba. Who knew he could make the US look so much like China.
So, US companies are already looking to carve up Cuba for their own interests, and what happens to the Cuban people be damned.
Hey, I know, stop meddling and let them decide what the hell they want.
America suddenly shoving all this stuff into Cuba isn't necessarily doing anything good for Cubans in the long-run.
You can't go from 6 decades of isolation to thinking US style Capitalism isn't going to fuck up the place if you try to do it overnight.
This is the same kind of colonialism which got them into the mess they were in when the revolution happened in the first place.
You want to improve relations? Close Guantanamo, and stop pretending a Constitutional amendment jammed in against their will has any validity ... otherwise you're still treating them like a colony instead of a separate country.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
plus representatives of Cisco, Comcast [...]
there are at least 6 proposals for an undersea cable between Havana and Florida
The downside is that the undersea cable will have a 3Mbps uplink and cap the island nation at 250GB/month.
It's ok, Republicans don't think they'd need more than that.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
From Canada, using Bell Canada, calling Cuba costs about $6.50/min. Who would want to call there at those ass-raping rates?
Even using Primus, one of the non-incumbent LD providers it's $2.60/min.
Even through a VOiP provider (voip.ms) it's $0.88/min.
Ass-rape everywhere.
I can't afford American health care any more.
My concern is that if we send Comcast over to Cuba they might see it as a threat or declaration of war and ask Russia to station nukes on Cuba again. And I wouldn't blame them. I think giving them Comcast defeats the whole purpose of trying to thaw relations with them.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Uh, I think that's the point of these meetings, to allow for service providers to now establish their own links with Cuba. Competition should dramatically reduce the cost. The nearest large mainland city is Miami, and being able to tie into the United States' network there, as opposed to having to go through Jamaica or Haiti or the Cayman Islands or through rural Mexico should have quite the impact on cost.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Why, because they have Venezuela as a fallback for all its communications and while Venezuela is very close to get in the club of failed countries, they still can provide the little connectivity that Cuba is interested to provide to its citizens, properly filtered and controlled as they want. You would say that is Cubans what run Venezuela now, because I'm certain that the bus driver they have now as president can't fuck so throughly a country like he has done by himself.
Cubans can take a look at Puerto Rico and say DO NOT WANT and nobody would blame them really. Sometimes is better to don't know better.
As for the telecom issue, there are two key issues for the Cubans. The first is that there is very limited bandwidth for Internet access. Cuba just doesn't have enough high-sped satellite or undersea connections to allow video streaming and other high-bandwidth uses. Instead, someone will burn DVDs with movies and other content, then share them with others. It's like the old sneaker-net. So ETECSA (or its successor) will have to address the bandwidth issue before Cuba can have better Internet access. The proposal for the cable to Florida seems like a good start.
The second issue is limited public access to the Internet. If you are at the UCI (Computer science university), it's easy to get on the Internet from their machines, which run Nova, a UCI-developed Linux distro. Home computers with network access are extremely rare, so most people wanting to get onto the Internet must go to an ETECSA-run center and pay for access. The rate is about $2 US/hour, payable only in "hard" currency CUCs, extremely high in a country where average monthly salary is about $25. Overall, the estimate is that about 3% of the Cuban population is on the Internet, mostly through ETESCA's nauta.cu portal.The situation isn't any better with mobile phones, where ETECSA hasn't yet reached 3G speeds and there are no data plans. More info on the ETECSA site (in Spanish).
they won't sell you compromised hardware and spy on you. If you go with the U.S services and vendors, they will be in control of your network, and have full insight in all your communications.
Congratulations on being both tasteless, sad, and funny at the same time.
Cuba is still a very oppressive place to live. Why are we rewarding that behavior?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Holy crap, it's actually true this time.
I don't there was ever another celebrity who had as many false death reports as that guy did.
So all Cuba's communications would go by undesea cable to a NSA station in Florida?
Hope the Cubans have good VPN software.