Thousands Of Cubans Now Have Internet Access (ap.org)

There's been a dramatic change in one of the world's least-connected countries. An anonymous reader quotes the AP: Since the summer of 2015, the Cuban government has opened 240 public Wi-Fi spots in parks and on street corners across the country... The government estimates that 100,000 Cubans connect to the internet daily. A new feature of urban life in Cuba is the sight of people sitting at all hours on street corners or park benches, their faces illuminated by the screen of smartphones connected by applications such as Facebook Messenger to relatives in Miami, Ecuador or other outposts of the Cuban diaspora...

Cuban ingenuity has spread internet far beyond those public places: thousands of people grab the public signals through commercially available repeaters, imported illegally into Cuba and often sold for about $100 -- double the original price. Mounted on rooftops, the repeaters grab the public signals and create a form of home internet increasingly available in private rentals for tourists and cafes and restaurants for Cubans and visitors alike.
The article also points out that last month, for the first time ever, 2,000 Cubans began receiving home internet access.

Comments

Bad headline

[gurps_npc]

I was all set to rag on them for only having 'thousands', when the article stated Hundreds of thousands. Big difference. Most people I know have thousands of dollars in the bank - rent cost more than 1 thousand, after all. But not many people have hundreds of thousands.

Hundreds of thousands means they actually are letting every day Cubans use the internet, rather than just government officials.

Re:Thousands of slashdotters

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. The title is intentionally misleading.

THOUSANDS OF CUBANS already had Internet access.

Would the editor care to add a term like new or additional to clear things up, or am I going to have to reach my hands through the monitor and strangle the idiot?

Easier ...

[PPH]

... for oppressive governments to track their population this way.

Welcome to the club.

Internet access in Cuba

[twasserman]

Yes, the public access points make it easier to connect, but there is only a single ISP: the Cuban national telecommunications monopoly, ETECSA. To use the Internet, you must buy their scratch-off cards at their offices, which involves waiting in line. You can then use them on your own devices or at the aging Windows machines at ETECSA's centers. The cost of access has dropped to $1.50/hour, but that's a lot of money in a country where the average monthly income is $25. If you are associated with one of the universities, particularly the Universidad de Ciencias Informaticas west of Havana, Internet access is reasonably good (and free), but outside of that, only about 4% of Cubans connect to the Internet. Others get information from "The Packet", whose managers download and assemble materials, including books, movies, news, etc., onto electronic media and make it available to all.

The good news is that the Cuban government isn't blocking access to websites, and that smartphones are becoming more widely available, but the absence of alternatives to ETECSA means that costs are likely to remain prohibitive for the vast majority of Cubans for the foreseeable future.

Re:Good News, but ...

[jodido]

I've been in Cuba dozens of times in the last fifteen years and I have never been unable to access a single web site. This is going back to when I used a dialup account from the apartment where I was living. Same was true when I used the U. of Havana computers, same is true using the government-sponsored wifi, same is true using hotel wifi. So let's just drop the whole "Cuban government internet censorship" meme, shall we? Since it's never existed.