Cuba-Jamaica link of the undersea cable is operational

Doug Madory of Renesys reports that the Cuba-Jamaica link of the ALBA-1 cable is carrying Cable and Wireless (C&W) traffic.

The first plot shows Transit, a Renesys-defined metric which is a function of several variables and may be interpreted as a surrogate for total capacity.  As you see, the orange area, indicating C&W capacity, starts May 13.

The traceroute data shown in the second plot is generated by 100 machines located around the world, which run traceroutes to approximately 1.5 million targets daily.  The plot shows the number of successful traceroutes, and, eyballing the data, it looks like about 1/8 of the traffic went over the Jamaican link.

Note that both plots show a sharp drop for Telefonica's cable service.  Again, just eyeballing the data, it looks like there may actually be a decrease in total cable utilization versus satellite.

I asked Doug whether he thought that might have been due to a policy decision or just the result of an automated configuration algorithm, but he could not say.

I guess time will tell.  It also remains to be seen whether this change has any impact upon those using the Internet in Cuba or those trying to reach Cuba from the rest of the world.