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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.
So, US companies are already looking to carve up Cuba for their own interests, and what happens to the Cuban people be damned.
That's not how Capitalism works.
Hey, I know, stop meddling and let them decide what the hell they want.
That *is* how Capitalism works.
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.
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
All in theory yes. In reality not even close, the statement from the GP is so much more accurate
So, US companies are already looking to carve up Cuba for their own interests, and what happens to the Cuban people be damned.
The consumer gets very little power in making decisions on their own. The power really lies with the companies. Chemicals put into our food, clothes, furniture, packaging, etc all put there without our consent or knowledge and absolutely no testing done on any of them other than, well it didn't kill someone on contact, must be ok.
Flint, MI water supply. Consumers had zero say in where their water came from or how it was treated.
Depending on where you live, you get little to no say in your electricity coming from green, renewable resources or from coal.
Again, depending on where you live, you have little to no choice in telecom/internet providers. Which, btw, is the vast majority of the land.
Consumer purchasing power only comes down to a few end user items and brands. But for the actual companies running the world, we have no choice at all.
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).
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.
Uhmm, Cuba was only isolated by the United States for the last 6 decades. Other countries have been doing business with them for a very long time.
Back in 2006 I was sent to Guantanamo Bay for a week-long contract. As I was walking into the Navy Exchange to grab some beer, my blackberry rang, I picked it up and answered, and everyone around me looked at me like I was from Mars. It dawned on me at that point that I probably had the only working cell phone on base, since as a Canadian (with a Canadian service contract), my phone had no trouble roaming onto the Cuban cell network.
Yeah, it was only GPRS, but for text email on a Blackberry it was still better than two rocks to bang together.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...