Statistics and predictions from Informatica 2018

The 2018 Informatica conference and trade show concludes today in Havana and Mayra Arevich, executive president of ETECSA, gave some Internet-related figures and predictions during a panel session.

• ETECSA's objective is "to reach more Cubans."
• There are 673 WIFI hotspots, 207 fixed navigation rooms and 771 navigation areas in hotels, Joven Clubs and post offices.
• As an indication of capacity, she said they had achieved up to 124,400 simultaneous connections.
• They plan to add 150 new wired and wireless areas in 2018, bringing coverage to 44% of the Popular Councils.
• They installed DSL in 14,634 homes last year and expect to add 52,500 this year. They've installed 12,682 so far this year.
• Ninety-five percent of the home DSL accounts are at the slowest speed of 1 mb/s. I wonder how much of that is due to poor wiring that will not allow higher speeds in an area and how much is due to cost. The 1 mb/s service costs 15 CUC for 30 hours online.
• Three G wireless is available throughout Havana and she estimated 47% of the population was covered.
• In 2017, more than 3,992 new data links to institutions of 23 national organizations and entities were installed and they plan to install 5,000 new data services to them this year. I assume she was referring to 5,000 new links and wonder what their speed will be.

(Click here for previous updates by Ms. Arevich).

Maimir Mesa Ramos, Minister of Communications, also gave a few statistics during his opening speech.

• There are now 614 Joven Clubs throughout the island.
• The Universidad de Ciencias Informáticas has graduated over 14,400 engineers since it was founded.
• There are 4.6 million Cuban cell-phone subscribers and that number is expected to exceed 5 million this year. (I wonder how many of those use 3G data and how many 3G-compatible handsets Cubans own).
• He referred to the development of "modest" content and services like Infomed, Ecured and Cubarte -- Cuba could do much more as a producer and distributor of educational and entertainment content for the Spanish-speaking world

(Click here for previous updates by Mr. Mesa).