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.

Comments

Comcast huh?

[mentil]

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.

The Comcast Missile Crisis

[Nidi62]

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.