The Fiber Optic Cable is No Longer a Secret

The Fiber Optic Cable is No Longer a Secret / Yusnaby Perez
Posted on April 8, 2013

During the last three years, everything about the submarine fiber optic
cable from Venezuela to Cuba was a state secret, or as we like to call
it: secretismo. You already know, to bring the Internet — information —
to a country can be very dangerous when the dominant method of the
ruling government is disinformation.

At present (as always), we Cubans are prohibited from contracting for
internet services in our homes. ETECSA, the monopoly company in Cuba
responsible for all telecommunications services, only provides
connectivity to foreign diplomats residing in Cuba, and even for them it
is expensive and restricted. For example, right now a resident diplomat
only has the option of contracting for dial-up Internet with a limit of
80 hours per month. The dial-up connection is established by a telephone
call between a modem and a server, which, due to the existing
infrastructure, has a very limited bandwidth (up to 48.0 kbit/s) and is
extremely slow.

Some foreign entities such as companies and embassies have the
opportunity (subject to availability) to contract for ADSL service with
a speed limit of 2Mbits/s. This ranges in price from 12,000 to 24,000
CUCs a month (twelve thousand to twenty thousand — which is slightly
more than that in dollars — I haven't added any extra zeros). In theory,
the increased cost of these services is because the final connection is
via satellite, which has a high cost and low transfer speed.

The fiber optic cable from Venezuela known as ALBA-1 will, in theory,
reduce the costs of Internet and telephone service. But, of course,
having a technology with enough capacity to bring service to the entire
country means they would no longer have excuses to prevent and limit
access to Cubans. Because of this, and only this, they've kept the
technical and functional status of the fiber optic cable "secret," since
it arrived from Venezuela three years ago. A very short time ago an
international news agency reported that they had begun to detect signals
of connectivity from Cuba through the ALBA-1 cable. No longer able to
hide the information, Cuba acknowledged, through an official note in the
newspaper Granma, that they had begun preliminary adjustments to begin
Internet service through the "Bolivarian cable."

Since then, all over Havana we can see ETECSA workers drilling in the
streets and burying cable extensions. The activity started first in the
Miramar and Siboney neighborhoods (you know who lives there). Then they
began to bury it in Old Havana, Central Havana and Vedado.

It's no longer a secret, now we Cubans can see that it already exists,
that the cable is already passing close to many of our homes. When will
we have access to the Internet? When will we have free right to
information? What additional justification will they have to limit our
access to the Internet? Who is benefiting now from the fiber optic cable?

We will continue to follow any movement on the issue.

http://translatingcuba.com/the-fiber-optic-cable-is-no-longer-a-secret-yusnaby-perez/