Tata switches from satellite to cable and Fidel likes to surf the Web

Doug Madory of Renesys, an Internet monitoring company, has reported that Cable and Wireless is no longer carrying traffic between Jamaica and Cuba, Telefonica is carrying less traffic than previously, and Tata is carrying more. Furthermore, the Tata traffic has shifted from satellite to the high-speed undersea cable, as shown in these improved traceroute times from Miami:

As we see, around June 25, Tata traceroute times from Miami dropped from about 580 milliseconds to about 130 milliseconds, indicating a shift from satellite to the undersea cable. At the same time, Telefonica traffic from Miami stopped. (The central band at around 330 milliseconds indicates asymmetric traffic which is over cable one way and satellite the other).

You should check Doug's post -- it contains several other plots and links, including one to an article on Fidel's birthday that says he likes to surf the Net. This reminded me of his early recognition of the importance of information technology, expressed at the time of the opening of the Youth Computer Club headquarters in Havana in 1991.

The undersea cable has brought faster connectivity to Fidel and a few others, but without improved domestic infrastructure, service will remain poor or nonexistent for the majority of the population.

Etecsa officials provide some details and make some promises

Etecsa officials held a press conference in which they made the point that the 118 new Internet access rooms are just the start of improved Internet service.

They promised lower prices, more access rooms, WiFi in access rooms, mobile connectivity, etc., but did not give specifics.

The article did, however, give some specifics about the service which will be offered starting June 4. The connection speed will be "up to" two megabits per second, depending upon the available infrastructure at each location. All Web services will be available -- chat, social networks, email, uploading and downloading of files, etc.

However, VOIP calls will be prohibited in accordance with Resolution 120/2003 of the Telecommunications Company of Cuba. I wonder whether "click to talk" services on Web sites will work. The VOIP restriction protects Etecsa revenue for now, but it may turn out to be difficult to enforce.

The slow connection speed -- up to 2 mbps -- reflects the remark of Jorge Luis Legros, Director of Etecsa Strategic Programs,  when asked about the impact of the undersea cable.  He said that it will improve service but "investments in networks and systems to bring access closer to the end user are needed."

What can Cuba do to attract that investment from China or other nations?

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Update 5/31/2013

Related commentary on the opening of the new access rooms from Granma:

La estrategia es continuar ampliando los servicios de Internet a la población
Vague promises of things to come

No será el mercado quien regule el acceso al conocimiento
Interview of Wilfredo González Vidal, viceministro del Ministerio de Comunicaciones

New public access will open June 4

The undersea cable link between Cuba and Jamaica came online in mid May and that connection may now be bearing fruit. Etecsa will open 118 new public access centers on June 4.

It is noteworthy that the access centers are dispersed throughout the island. Only 12 of the 118 are in Havana. That indicates the existence of a domestic backbone.  It would be interesting to get some information on it.

It is also indicative of a Cuban policy of developing areas outside the capital and major cities, which has been followed since the early networking days.  Even then, Cuba was less focused on one or two major cities than other developing nations.

Pricing will be as follows:

• Domestic browsing and email .60 CUC/hour
• International email plus domestic navigation 1.50 CUC/hour
• International browsing and email 4.50 CUC/hour

Patrons will also be allowed to bring flash drives for uploading and downloading files.

This is a step in the right direction, but these rates are very high by international standards and beyond the reach of many Cubans.  Given the capacity of the undersea cable, it is hard to understand the high prices and the large difference between domestic and international connectivity.  Perhaps Etecsa consulted with AT&T, Comcast and Verizon in setting their rates :-).

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Update 5/28/2013

Cuban access prices

Here is full price schedule for permanent (rechargeable) and prepaid tourist Internet access.

The graphic design of the page is trendy by Cuban standards -- they must have been watching ads for MicroSoft Windows 8!

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Update
5/29/2013

The New York Times had an article on the new centers and prices (nyti.ms/18tZEr8). It makes the usual points about cost, constraints and survailance. Here is an ironic quote:

“It’s a real bargain,” said a user on the state news Web site Cuba Si who gave the name Osvaldo Ulloa. “I mean, I work for a week and then I can get online for hour — fabulous.”

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Update 5/29/2013

It is noteworthy that only 12 of the 118 new access centers are in Havana.

Havana  12 Pinar del Rio  5 Artemis  8 Mayabeque  2 Matanzas  18 Cienfuegos  5 Villa Clara  15 Sancti Spiritus  9 Ciego de Avila  4 Camaguey  9 Las Tunas  9 Holguin  4 Granma  7 Santiago de Cuba  7 Guantanamo  3 Isle of Youth  1 Total 118

Since the early days of the Internet, Cuba has favored wide dispersal more than most developing nations.

Connectivity remains slow and variable

A colleague in Cuba ran traceroute from a computer on a dial up link in Havana to several destinations in Cuba, Venezuela and the US. The following table shows the round trip latency time for three tests to each destination:

As you see, the international connections are very slow. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to use a modern Web site at any of those locations. Only the third test on the last line (to the US) seems to be using the ALBA-1 cable one-way.

Not only are the times slow, the variance to the same location is very high. Consider again the last line -- three tests resulted in three very different times. Even the variance within Cuba is high.

I cannot explain this -- some may be due to problems with my colleague's computer or Internet connection -- but hopefully we will see improvement soon.

If others run tests from Cuba and get different results, let us know (in confidence).

Cuban Government acknowledges test of the ALBA-1 cable

Click to enlarge this timeline

A short Granma article confirms that the ALBA-1 cable is being tested.

The article says the cable was operational last August and has been used for traffic quality testing on the Internet since January 10.

The article concludes with a disclaimer saying that when testing is complete there will not be automatic improvement of access since they must make investments in the domestic telecommunications infrastructure, which will require increased foreign exchange resources. The plan is to gradually increase socially useful use of the link.

We have been tracking the progress of the cable for some time, and long ago pointed out that without major domestic infrastructure investment, the cable would be a strong link in a very weak chain. The Cuban, Venezuelan and Chinese policy makers and technicians working on this project had to be aware of this imbalance.

I have received informal reports of fiber being laid in certain parts of Havana, but tremendous investment would be needed to deliver anything like modern Internet connectivity to a broad segment of the population. It is hard to imagine that happening without major changes in government policy and institutions.

Renesys detects some two-way cable traffic

Click to enlarge

At exactly 14:01 UTC Tuesday (09:01 local time), Renesys saw a third mode in their latency tests. In this plot, you can see the original pure-satellite mode (A), the apparent one way satellite mode we mentioned in an earlier post (B), and a third, lower mode (C) that indicates two-way cable connectivity.

It seems there is a mix of satellite, one-way cable and bi-directional cable connectivity.

First traffic on the ALBA-1 cable

Doug Madory, who has been keeping us up to date on traffic (or the or lack of it) on the ALBA-1 submarine cable between Venezuela and Cuba pointed me to a new blog post this morning, in which he reports limited cable traffic.

For the past six years, three satellite providers, Tata, NewCom and Intelsat have served Cuba. But, as you see in the above graph (click to enlarge), Telefonica traffic (dark grey) began last week.

Madory also monitored the round trip time to send data packets from Guadalajara, Mexico, Dallas, Texas and Sao Paulo and Joao Pessoa, Brazil to Cuba. He noted a significant speed up on all four routes at the same time on January 14th, indicating that some Telefonica traffic is being carried over the cable. But, since the average time remains quite high, Madory concludes that

Telefonica's service to ETECSA is, either by design or misconfiguration, using its new cable asymmetrically (i.e., for traffic in only one direction), similar to the situation we observed in Lebanon in 2011. In such a configuration, ETECSA enjoys greater bandwidth and lower latencies (along the submarine cable) when receiving Internet traffic but continues to use satellite services for sending traffic.

He goes on to speculate that the first evidence of ALBA-1 traffic and the elimination of exit visas might be part of a greater trend towards a freer and more open Cuba.

What's up with the ALBA-1 cable? Time to follow the money.

MIC Minisiter Maimir Mesa
commenting on the ALBA-1 cable

Last week I received an email from Doug Madory of Renesys Corporation, the Internet monitoring company. Doug is the analyst who, last May, provided us with smoking-gun evidence that the ALBA-1 undersea cable was not carrying Internet traffic.

Doug says there has been "no change on connectivity in Cuba. Still all satellite." He promises to keep an eye on the situation and let us know if it changes.

He also provided a link to a post entitled "What Happened to the Cable? Cubans Discuss Internet Access" on Global Voices, a portal for blogs and citizen media.

The post links to a number of Cuban blogs with posts about the cable and notes that, after much interest and hype, the news has gone silent. Consider, for example, this post from the blog From Inside Cuba. The post chronicles the coverage of the cable in the blog Cubadebate starting in 2007 and suddenly stopping in 2011. It concludes with a long list of pointed questions.

This post is consistent with what we have observed earlier and the fact that Minisiter of Informatics and Communication Maimir Mesa said nothing about the cable in his recent report to Parliament.

On the surface it seems that $70 million was spent on a cable that was installed with no thought of how it would be used or what sort of domestic infrastructure would be needed to exploit it, and then, it was abandoned.

One has to ask what is going on. I am not a journalist, but, if I were, I would follow the money. Posts on Cuba Debate and BNAmericas (account required), say the $70 million came as loan from China to Venezuela.

Did the $70 million come from the Chinese taxpayer? If not, where did it come from? How much of it went to Alcatel Lucent for their work? How much to people in China, Cuba and Venezuela and who got it? It seems there may be invisible hands in socialist economies as well as capitalist.

Limited pilot testing of the ALBA-1 cable?

Muchas Gracias sent us a link to an article in which Jorge Arreaza, Venezuelan minister of Science and Technology says the cable is operational, but not saying what it was being used for (http://www.diariodecuba.com/cuba/11252-venezuela-asegura-que-el-cable-de-internet-esta-absolutamente-operativo).

I have also heard an unconfirmed report that the cable is operational and being used in some Venezuelan government offices to access databases they have stored in Cuba. That could be a pilot test for the ALBA-1 link.

That would be consistent with the Renesys data we just posted (http://laredcubana.blogspot.com/2012/05/hard-data-on-idle-alba-1-undersea-cable.html), but it would not be Internet connectivity.

Venezuela storing their data in Cuba reminds me of the International Center for Scientific and Technical Information in Moscow (http://www.icsti.su/portal/eng/index.php). During the pre-Internet days, they provided centralized database access for all of the communist nations. Today they are on the Internet, serving a different group of nations.

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Update 7/17/2013

I just came across this 2011 article may have been the source of the rumor that early tests of the undersea cable were in support of database applications Cuba runs for the Venezuelan government. The article asserts that Albet Engineering and Systems, Inc. runs the citizen ID application for the government of Venezuela, raising concern of election fraud and other secret manipulation.

It also draws attention to the link between Albet and the University of Information Sciences (UCI). Albet owns the commercial rights to all products and services offered by the UCI -- they seem to be the marketing arm for the applications that UCI students and faculty develop. (We discussed UCI in some detail in a 2011 report. They emphasize practical work on projects -- making students a source of low-cost labor for Albet).

I just found this old article -- has there been more on this story or other Albet/UCI projects?

Hard data on the idle ALBA-1 undersea cable

I received an email today from Doug Madory of Renesys, a company that monitors the dynamic state of the global Internet.

Madory wrote that there is no evidence of a submarine cable in use in Cuba in 2012. He said that latencies to Cuba are very stable and clearly satellite (>480 ms).  He attached the following visualizations (click to enlarge):

The numbers in the figure legends indicate the connecting autonomous networks -- CubaData (11960) is the state telecom of Cuba, and they have three satellite providers Tata (6453), Intelsat (22351) and NewCom (32034).

Renesys is "The Internet Intelligence Authority" -- they constantly monitor the state of the global Internet. You may have seen their reports of network outages when nations went off line during the Arab Spring, for example, this Syrian episode. You can get a sense of what they do by following their blog and Internet events bulletin.

What happened to the ALBA-1 undersea cable?

(AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos, File)

Associated Press reporter Andrea Rodgriguez, @ARodriguezAP, has published an article stating that "mystery shrouds the fate" of the ALBA-1 undersea cable linking Venezuela and Cuba.

Cuban officials promised that the cable would in use last fall, but Rodriguez finds no evidence that it is use in government offices or elsewhere.  She interviewed a dozen employees of public institutions who said they have seen no noticeable improvement in their work connections.  Some said that download speeds have even gotten a little slower.  She also made "multiple attempts to get Cuban and Venezuelan government officials to comment," but was unsuccessful.

She is a reporter who is on the ground in Cuba and unable to find evidence of the deployment or application of the cable.

How might we explain this?  I can think of three hypotheses:

1. There have been claims of corruption, and some of the peple Rodgriguez interviewed corroborate that assertion.
2. I have suggested earlier that a fast undersea cable would be a strong link in a weak (or nonexistent) chain if Cuba's domestic Internet infrastructure were not upgraded to utilize it.  Skilled networking technicians would also be needed.  Perhaps capital to upgrade the domestic network is not available.
3. The Arab Spring may have frightened the government.   Raúl Castro opposed the Internet when Cuba connected in the mid-1990s.  In October 1997 he stated that "Glasnost, which undermined the USSR and other socialist countries, consisted of handing over the mass media, one by one, to the enemies of socialism." Perhaps he fears an Internet supported "Cuban Spring."

Or, maybe the answer is none of the above -- or all of the above.  Whatever the reason, it seems that a reported 70 million dollar investment is gathering barnacles and little more.

Is Ms. Rodgriguez wrong?  Does anyone have evidence of the cable being in operation?  I would love to hear about it and, even better, run a few pings and traceroutes.