Havana can have 5G before Miami

(Click here for a Spanish translation of this post).

Havana needs 5G more than Miami does.

Compared to Miami, Havana is an Internet desert, but Havana may have 5G wireless connectivity before Miami. 5G architecture, US politics and policy, and the 5G timetable favor Havana. Let's start with 5G architecture.

Architecutre

Small cells (source)

5G will require many "small cells" because it uses high-frequency radio signals that don't travel as far as 4G signals and are more easily blocked by obstructions like trees and buildings. For example, there are about 154,000 cell towers in the US today and the CTIA, an industry association, estimates that there will be 800,000 small cells by 2026.

In Miami, small cell radios will be installed by professional employees of and contractors to the large mobile phone companies. Havana has only one telecommunication company, ETECSA, but it is home to SNET, the world's largest community network that is not connected to the Internet. Today, SNET is illegal but tolerated, and if ETECSA were willing to legitimize and collaborate with SNET, SNET members could play a role in siting and installing small cells. SNET's legal status is currently being reconsidered and by the time Havana is ready to deploy 5G, SNET could play a major cost and time-saving role. (Note that Cuba's new constitution de-centralizes executive governance by reducing provincial government and strengthening municipal government, possibly increasing the likelihood of local control of Internet infrastructure).

Havana's population is about 4.5 times that of Miami, but the population density is about one-tenth of Miami's. Low population density lends itself to citizen installation -- antennas will be relatively easy to site and install. Furthermore, obtaining permission to install them in Havana will be easier than Miami. Wire-line Internet service providers have already installed broadband infrastructure throughout Miami and, since 5G will offer a fixed-broadband alternative, the incumbents will resist it politically. On the other hand, 5G will fill a near-vacuum in Havana -- Havana needs 5G more than Miami does.

Time

Average 4G download speed, Mbps (source)

Wireless standards are complex and evolve over time. The Third Generation Partnership Project was established in 1998 to define 3G mobile standards and is now defining 5G standards. Thousands of people from equipment manufacturers, telecommunication companies, national and international standards organizations, and professional societies are involved in the process and the technology and standards evolve over time. (For example, between February of 2016 and January 2019, average 4G download speed doubled in the US).

While we will see an ad proclaiming that Miami "has 5G" this year or next, the capability and applications will be marginally improved over 4G and only available in limited parts of the city. Perhaps five years from now 5G standards and equipment that can support novel applications will become available.

In the interim, neither city will see much 5G impact, but it will give Havana time to continue with their current program of stopgap measures like 3G mobile access. If the price of 3G is significantly reduced, Cuba will develop trained, demanding Internet users and app developers who are ready to embrace 5G once it is available.

Stopgap measures like 3G, public WiFi, and home DSL will not close the fiber gap between Miami and Havana, but in five years improved terrestrial wireless and low and medium-earth orbit (LEO and MEO) satellite connectivity will be available for 5G backhaul. Cuba is already a customer of MEO Internet-service provider O3b and in five years O3b will have significantly improved capacity and performance. Additionally, LEO providers SpaceX, OneWeb and China's Hongyun Project all plan to be offering service over Cuba in five years. SpaceX is based in the US and OneWeb in Great Britain, so Hongyun may have the inside track here, although they will have less capacity than their competitors.

Politics and policy

source

Trump's trade war with China favors Havana over Miami. As FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel points out: "levying new tariffs on everything from semiconductors to modems to routers is not going to make it any easier to deploy 5G wireless service. In fact, it will make it much more expensive."

His ban against Huawei further advantages Havana since Huawei is the world's leading producer of telecommunication equipment for service providers with a comfortable lead over their 5G competitors Nokia and Ericsson. They are also the number 2, in unit sales, and number 3, in revenue, smartphone manufacturer. If the ban persists, Miami will not have access to Huawei equipment.

By contrast, Huawei has supplied nearly all of Cuba's Internet infrastructure from its backbone to WiFi hotspots and home DSL and they are almost certain to be Cuba's 5G vendor. It is likely that China will contribute financially if they see Cuba as a strategic ally in their effort to extend the Digital Silk Road to Latin America and the Caribbean.

The US government was instrumental in funding the development of the Internet and could adopt positive 5G policies like investing in R&D or providing incentives to participate in the global 5G standards process, but Trump eschews global cooperation and Chinese companies are playing a leading role in the definition of 5G standards, which will solidify Huawei's leadership. Chinese telephone companies with 1.58 billion mobile phone subscriptions, will also influence standards as large 5G equipment customers.

Rather than seeing 5G as a cooperative global effort, Trump sees it as a competitive race and his 5G policy focuses on spectrum allocation (which is going poorly) and a call for State and local governments to improve "access to land, infrastructure, and property that will support new wireless networks, including rural America." [sic] That call sounds like it was drafted by a lobbyist for the incumbent mobile telcos or perhaps an ex-Associate General Counsel at Verizon like FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and it will meet resistance. (China has no such conflict).

I used the word "can" instead of "will" in the title of this post because the outcome depends upon the will of the Cuban government and ETECSA.

Does China's Digital Silk Road to Latin America and the Caribbean run through Cuba?

China will not ignore Latin America and the Caribbean forever and Cuba is a logical place to start.

DSR IT infrastructure projects as of 12/2018 (source).

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an ambitious, long-term, global investment and development program. It was launched in 2013 with a focus on infrastructure -- roads, railroads, pipelines, undersea cables and ports. Since then China has invested $80 billion and signed 173 BRI agreements with 125 countries and 29 international organizations.

Building a Digital Silk Road (DSR) is a BRI subgoal. The DSR was added in 2015 under the name "Information Silk Road" with the goals of improving international communications connectivity and fostering the internationalization of China’s rapidly growing tech companies. The DSR plan addresses technologies like security, machine learning, 5G wireless, chip design and manufacturing and applications in areas like e-commerce, e-government, and smart cities. It also encompasses infrastructure in space -- the BeiDou satellite navigation system, the Hongyun low-earth orbit broadband Internet project and the Digital Belt and Road Earth observation program.

Huawei's Caribbean cables (source).

China Unicom and Camcom installed an undersea cable between Cameroon and Brazil with Huawei doing the engineering and installation. Previously, Huawei had installed the underwater cables shown here, but the DSR project has focused primarily on Eurasia and Africa. However, China will not ignore Latin America and the Caribbean forever and Cuba is a logical place to start.

Cuban delegates attended the thematic-forum on the DSR at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in April and Cuba's digital ties to China date back many years:

• Huawei contracted to build a fiber optic backbone in 2000 and their office is in the same complex as ETECSA's.
• Shanghai Bell was a partner in the joint venture that installed Cuba's undersea cable.
• China may have provided a loan to finance Cuba's undersea cable.
• Cuba had difficulty paying their Chinese debt and China forgave six billion dollars in 2011.
• China offers Cuba favorable financing on consumer and infrastructure telecommunication equipment.
• China and Cuba recently signed economic cooperation agreements.
• Chinese laptops and tablets are assembled in Cuba.
• Cuban professors receive Chinese laptops.
• ETECSA sells and services Huawei phones.
• Huawei equipment is used in Cuba's backbone, home DSL and public WiFi networks.

(Breitbart reported that Cuba has agreed to bring the BRI to the west, but I am not sure if that is evidence that they will or they won't :-)

Cuba's first connection to the Internet was subsidized by the US National Science Foundation and used Cisco equipment, but it's been downhill ever since. President Obama made a sustained effort to establish a connection with Cuba, but little has come of that and Trump's policies on trade, immigration and Cuba have moved us further from many Latin American and Caribbean nations, creating an opening for China and the DSR.

Update 2/3/2020

Huawei built an undersea cable connecting four landing points in southern Chile and Chile is studying the feasibility of a trans-pacific undersea cable connecting Valparaiso with China or Japan. Chilean President Sebastian Pinera met with Huawei executives on a visit to China in April and invited them to bid on the project.

Laptops for Cuban professors

Late last year, we learned that China's 90,000 employee Haier Group would be producing laptops and tablets in partnership with GEDEME, a Cuban manufacturer that will assemble the machines using Haier parts, equipment, and production processes.

Last week, a friend who is a professor at the University of Havana told me that he and other professors have been given GDM laptops. He said UCI, ISPJAE and Univerisity of Havana faculty were the first to receive the laptops, but eventually all professors at all universities would get them.

When Haier announced they would be producing laptops in Cuba, they said would be Core i3, Celeron and Core i5 CPUs with up to 1 TB of memory. The processor in my friend's machine is a 1.60GHz Celeron N3060, which Intel announced April 1, 2015. The N3060 is a system on a chip with two processor cores, a graphic processing unit, and a memory controller. His laptop has 4 GB of RAM, a 97.31 GB hard drive, a CD-ROM drive and a 1,024 x 768 pixel display with 32-bit color depth. It has a wired Ethernet port, but no WiFi or Bluetooth.

The machine came with UCI's Nova Unix operating system, but my friend has installed Windows in its place and he says most people do the same. (Cuban officials say they can achieve software independence using Nova, but Cuba is not large enough to support its own software, services, and standards).

These are low-end laptops, but they represent a significant step up over phones and tablets for content creation. They are also power-efficient, making them suitable for portable use, but for some reason, they do not have WiFi radios.

A laptop without WiFi is striking today. I don't know what the marginal cost of WiFi would have been, but Alibaba offers many chips for under $5 in relatively small lots. Why don't these machines have WiFi radios? Is the government trying to discourage portable use at home or public-access hotspots?

Regardless of the reason, WiFi dongles are a low-cost fix. There are not a lot of WiFi dongles for sale on Revolico today and their prices are high, but I bet the offerings pick up if these laptops roll out.

China's Haier Group will manufacture low-end tablets and laptops in Cuba

Chinese companies are the primary vendors of Cuban Internet infrastructure and consumer electronics -- now they are moving into Internet-related manufacturing.

Haier is in 29 countries

I had never heard of the Haier Group until yesterday, when I read that they would be manufacturing laptops and tablets in Cuba.

A quick Google search revealed my parochial ignorance. It turns out that Haier is one of the world's largest home appliance and consumer electronics companies, selling under its own brand name and producing "white label" products for other companies.

In 1999, when they were making one third of the refrigerators sold in China, they decided to enter the US market. It took them a year to get a meeting with Walmart and this year they finalized a $5.6 billion purchase of General Electric's appliance division.

In speaking of the GE acquisition, Bloomberg reported that Haier "had always fancied themselves the GE of China so now they get the real thing," but another Bloomberg post quotes an analyst as saying that “Haier is not interested in becoming the GE of China; they want to be the Apple of China.”

Since Haier is going to be making laptops and tablets in Cuba, I checked out their current offerings. They are low-end and very cheap -- the opposite of Apple today. For example, their 10-inch Windows 10 tablet with a detachable keyboard sells for $149.99. The reviews are not surprising. It is slow and the build quality poor, but it is fine for running a browser with 6 or 8 tabs open and Office apps -- just don't expect to edit video or run demanding games on the machine.

They say the laptops will be "6th generation," which sounds pretty cool until you see the specs -- Core i3, Celeron and Core i5 CPUs with up to 1 TB of memory. It is clear that this factory will not be churning out the "Apples of China" for some time. (Maybe they started counting Intel generations with the 4004).

They are partnering with GEDEME, a Cuban manufacturer and wholesaler of telecommunication and electronic devices as well as office furniture and radio towers. It sounds like GEDEME is a jack-of-all trades manufacturer and they will assemble the machines using Haier parts, equipment and production processes. The factory capacity is said to be 500 units per day, but only 50,000 units are planned for the first year and initially all units will be for the wholesale market and government offices.

GEDEME factory -- four managers, one worker, no robots -- symbolic if not literal.

The software partner is Cuba's University of Informatics Science, which will be responsible for drivers and customization for the operating system -- presumably Windows 10.

This reminds me of Japanese industry after World War II. They began making low-end products using local labor, but gradually moved up the value chain until they were using foreign labor and producing high-end products. Cuba is the foreign labor in this case -- low-cost and relatively well educated.

However, there has been a major shift in manufacturing technology since "made in Japan" meant low-end products -- assembly work is now heavily automated and will be more so in the future. I wonder how many Cubans will be employed in this factory and what sorts of jobs they will have.

Chinese companies are the primary vendors of Cuban Internet infrastructure and consumer electronics -- now they are moving into manufacturing.

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Update 3/6/2017

Haier is now making and selling Android set-top boxes in Cuba as well as tablets and TV sets.

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Update 7/3/2017

At the end of March, GEDEME announced that they had assembled 3,500 and 583 tablets. I came across this picture of one being used during the Round Table TV program:

I'd be curious to know a couple of things -- how did they decide that this was a "sixth generation" machine and what do the initials "GDM" stand for?

The cost of doing business in Cuba

The U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council reports that the Google Global Cache project is being paid for by Google and will cost the government of Cuba nothing.

That is not surprising since Google will gain public visibility and their services will improve. More important, it establishes a business relationship with ETECSA and the cost is a drop in their bucket -- much less than the cost of selling themselves to the Cuban government has been.

The post also states that

People’s Republic of China-based companies have and continue to provide (either at no cost or with long-term favorable financing backed by the government of the People’s Republic of China) telecommunications and communications infrastructure and consumer communication devices to the Republic of Cuba.

That is more surprising since Chinese companies, especially Huawei, are selling a lot of phones, installing a lot of infrastructure and already have business relationships with Cuba. China was also involved in the installation, and some say financing, of the undersea cable connecting Cuba to the Internet.

This post reminds me of a Wikileak from 2010 in which it was disclosed that Cuba was having trouble repaying Chinese debt.

Excerpt from US diplomatic report (Wikileaks)

ETECSA will sell -- and service -- Huawei phones.

ETECSA has agreed to sell and service Huawei phones. Since Cuban cell service is 2G, they will be used for voice calls and Internet access at WiFi hotspots and elsewhere. (I have heard that there is a little 3G coverage in Cuba -- is that the case)?

Javier Villariño, Huawei’s director of sales in Cuba, said the phones would “improve the voice quality and data services offered by ETECSA." Perhaps more important, he said Etecsa would be able to distribute spare parts and accessories, and train repair staff. That sounds like ETECSA will be competing with independent, self-employed phone repair people.

Since I am a customer (victim) of a mobile access oligopoly and a fixed access monopoly (Sprint and Time Warner Cable), that sounds ominous to me.

Photos of the phones are shown below -- does anyone recognize them or know their specs?

China has dominated the Cuban Internet infrastructure market in recent years and Chinese exports to Cuba are increasing in all sectors, reaching $1.33 billion in the first three quarters of this year, up by 82.4 percent. On the other hand, Cuban exports to China have dropped, due to a decrease in the production of nickel, which is the country's principal export. Over 40 Chinese companies participated in the 33rd Havana International Fair, which ends today.

Cuban infrastructure investment -- China won the first round

China won the first round, what about the future?

In December 2014, the administration announced that we were taking "historic steps to chart a new course in our relations with Cuba and to further engage and empower the Cuban people." The following month, the US International Trade Commission began a study of the economic effects of US restrictions on trade with and travel to Cuba. They held hearings on potential exports in several sectors and I testified on potential telecommunication exports.

In March, the US sent a high-level delegation to Cuba to discuss telecommunication and the Internet and no doubt Internet service and equipment companies began analyzing the potential Cuban market. Most visibly, Google visited several times and eventually made a concrete proposal for the installation of some sort of wireless infrastructure, but that offer was rejected, perhaps for lack of trust in the US Government and Google.

Google made several trips to Cuba, but their proposal was rejected.

This month the White House extended our policy, authorizing US companies to establish a business presence in Cuba and provide "certain" telecommunications and Internet-based services or do joint ventures or enter into licensing agreements to market such services.

To date, this effort has led just a few small Internet deals like Netflix offering Cubans accounts, Airbnb renting rooms or Verizon offering cell-phone roaming in Cuba.

Cuba has turned to China, not the US, for Internet connectivity and equipment and is committed to doing so in the short term future.

China played a major role in the financing and construction of the ALBA-1 undersea cable, which connects Cuba to Venezuela and Jamaica. It was reported that China lent Venezuela $70 million to finance the cable, which was installed by a joint venture made up of Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell and Telecomunicaciones Gran Caribe (TGC) -- TGC is a joint venture between Telecom Venezuela (60%) and Cuban Transbit SA (40%), both state-owned companies.

The cable landed in Cuba in February 2011, but the first traffic was not transmitted until January 2013. Much of Cuba's international traffic continued to be routed over satellite links until July 2015, when nearly all of it had finally shifted to the cable. Cuba's international traffic continued to be routed over slow, expensive satellite links for over four years because the cable landing point is at the east end of the island and there was little domestic infrastructure to connect it to Havana and other locations.

The ALBA-1 cable traffic has shifted from satellite (blue) to cable.

At the time of the cable installation, we speculated that China might play a role in building the domestic infrastructure needed to reach it and it turns out that Cuba had awarded Huawei a contract to build a national fiber-optic network in the year 2000. Today there is a backbone network connecting the Cuban provinces to the cable landing point. The current load is light compared to expected future traffic from homes, schools, universities and public access locations, so Cuba must be planning a faster, more comprehensive backbone and I imagine Huawei is involved.

ETECSA backbone diagram, date/status unknown, source: Nearshore America

Huawei equipment was also used in the recent installation of 35 WiFi hotspots across the island. Since they claim the access points will support 50-100 simultaneous users at 1 Mb/s speed, these 35 locations must connect to the national backbone network. While 35 access points are a drop in the bucket, Cuba is committed to adding more. Counting WiFi, "navigation rooms," Youth Clubs and hotels, there are now 683 public access points in Cuba, all of which reach the backbone.

Huawei WiFi antennae

In addition to expanding public access and the backbone, they plan to make DSL connectivity available to 50% of Cuban homes by 2020. (Note that that is not to say 50% of Cuban homes will be online). Doing so will require new equipment in the telephone central offices serving those homes and Huawei will supply that equipment. Two other Chinese companies, ZTE and TP Link are providing DSL modems for network users. (ZTE has an office in Havana and may also be involved in the backbone network).

Home Internet: Huawei central office equipment and ZTE and TP Link modems

Cuba also has plans to connect all schools and make fiber connections to the backbone available to all universities. I don't know whose equipment will be used for those upgrades, but, if Huawei is the backbone vendor, I suspect that they would have the inside track on customer premises equipment (CPE). A recent market research report shows that Chinese CPE sales are growing rapidly, fueled by a large domestic market.

Lina Pedraza Rodríguez, Minister of Finance and Prices, said that Cuba is in
"very advanced" negotiations with Huawei, May 2015.

In spite of China's success in Cuba, all has not been perfect. As this Wikileaks memo from the US Interests Section in Havana shows, the Chinese have had some difficulty collecting Cuban debt. Cuba remains a tricky place to do business.

Finally, note that all of these sales are for equipment, not network operation. While Huawei has sold Cuba equipment, the backbone installation has been supervised by a Cuban engineer who has worked for Huawei since 2002 and Huawei does not seem to have an office in Cuba. Cuba bought Telecom Italia's share of ETECSA, Cuba's monopoly telecommunication company, in 2011 and remains independent. That may turn out to be a good or bad thing for the Cuban people, depending upon ETECSA's policy and goals.

It looks like China has won the first round. That's the bad news for US companies. The good news is that very little infrastructure has been sold so far and much of what has been sold and is planned for the near future is already obsolete by today's standards. That says there will be a much larger second round -- will the US be a player?

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Update 10/1/2015

A Cuban reader commented on Huawei's success in Cuba:

In early 2000 gradually they replaced all Cisco router by Huawei, including my office. probably today 95% of all routers in Cuba are Huawei, a "legacy" of Ramiro Valdez was minister, and the millions that Cuba spent in the "battle of ideas."

He also said that Huawei has had an office in the Miramar Trade Center in Havana for over ten years. (I could not find it using Google).

Note that Ramiro Valdés called the Internet "the wild stallion of the new technologies," which "could and should be controlled and used to serve peace and development" in spite of the fact that it construes one of the "mechanisms for global extermination."

If dealing with Huawei was politically motivated, the Internet infrastructure market may open in the future. (Some readers will claim that payoffs were involved, but I have no evidence one way or the other on that).

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Update 3/5/2016

The home page of the Mariel port web site features images of Chinese cranes, but China has supplied more than cranes. Doug Madory, Director of Internet Access at Dyn Research, sent me an email saying he had found evidence of Chinese software on the site -- an error message with Chinese characters.

I went to the site and, at first, could not reproduce the error message, but I have been able to subsequently-- it is due to slow load time. When the site begins to load, it displays three links as shown below, but the page is not fully loaded. Clicking on "Sobre TC Mariel" displays the error message with Chinese characters ("Data failed to load!" according to Google Translate), shown below.

Chinese error message on the Mariel site

Doug followed up with a snippet of JavaScript with Chinese comments, saying things like "Cookie's name," "Will be saved" and "Cookie format is a semicolon spaces." (It's kind of cool to see that Chinese programmers write comments just like we do).

Chinese comments in Mariel site code

It will not be easy for the US to compete against the Chinese in Cuba -- Huawei and others are well-established, formidable competitors. That is one of the hidden costs of the Cuban embargo.

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Update 6/3/2916

Is this a coincidence? The Chinese news agency, Xinhua, just posted a rosy puff-piece about Cuba's plan to "expand Internet access in public areas and private businesses." It is not a news report -- it rehashes things like their planning to deploy more public access via WiFi and Internet cafes and takes a shot at the US trade embargo.

A couple days later, the Wall Street Journal reported that "The U.S. Commerce Department has subpoenaed Huawei Technologies Co., demanding that the Chinese telecommunications giant submit all information on its export and re-export of technological goods to Iran, North Korea and other sanctioned nations."

Can the US really do much about Huawei in Cuba? I doubt that they are highly dependent upon components from US suppliers and, to the extent that they do use US components, wouldn't they find substitutes if blocked?

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Update 12/27/2016

China has been Cuba's most important source of Internet consumer and infrastructure equipment and now China's Haier Group will be manufacturing low-end laptops and tablets in China. Haier is a large, multinational manufacturer of home appliances and consumer electronics -- they are in 29 countries and recently acquired General Electric's appliance division. For now, they will be making low-end laptops and tablets in collaboration with GEDEME, a Cuban manufacturer, but, what are their plans for Cuba? Is this a strategic investment?

GEDEME factory -- four managers, one worker, no robots -- symbolic if not literal.

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Update 5/18/2017

David Crosswell points out that China has been active in other parts of the Cuban economy as have the Russians and Iranians and provides links to several examples in his comments on this post.

Cuba, given its proximity, is critical to our national security -- a lesson we learned during the Cuban missile crisis. Trump should think about "unvetted" Iranians 90 miles from Florida.

https://anewdomain.net/china-wins-first-round-cuban-internet-investment-analysis/

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Update 4/1/2025

It was just pointed out to me that a version of this post was cited in the recommendation against the connection of the ARCOS-1 cable, which I supported.

Speculation on the Cuban Internet backbone

Since the earliest days of the Internet, Cuba has stressed geographically distributed connectivity, unlike most developing nations, which focused on one or a few large cities. That policy is still in effect. There are plans to connect universities, schools and homes and there are already public WiFi hotspots and and Internet-access rooms in every province. (Of the original 118 public access rooms, only 12 were in Havana).

A backbone network covering the length of the island is necessary to achieve such geographically dispersed connectivity and, since essentially all of Cuba's international traffic is now routed over the undersea cable connection at the east end of the island, there must already be a backbone network connecting the provinces. The provision of 1 mbps international connectivity at the new WiFi hotspots is further evidence of a backbone.

I know nothing of the architecture or technology (fiber and wireless?) of today's backbone, but the load is very light compared to a future with planned traffic from homes, schools, universities and public access locations, so Cuba must be planning a high speed backbone.

We got a very hazy view of that plan in a Cuban market research study, which was just published by Nearshore America. The report includes diagrams of the three-phase backbone plan shown below:

These diagrams are attributed to ETECSA, but they have been substantially redrawn to protect the identity of the person who supplied them. While the legend on each slide shows 2 fixed and 9 reconfigurable multiplexers, I suspect that refers to the final phase. Similarly, I am guessing that "12 OLA" refers to optical wavelengths in each network link, but that is just a guess. The author of the Nearshore report was not told the time schedule for the phases.

I'd be curious to know a lot more, like who is designing and installing the backbone and who is supplying the equipment -- for example, are those Huawei multiplexers?

The one thing these images show us is that ETECSA is indeed planning a fiber backbone network.

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Uodate 8/20/2015

@yawnboy sent me a link to material released by Edward Snowden showing that the NSA was thinking of installing back doors in Huawei routers in 2010.

An NSA presentation included this slide:

The text note accompanying the slide reads in part:

Many of our targets communicate over Huawei produced products, we want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products - we also want to ensure that we retain access to these communication lines, etc.

I'm offering this in jest, but it would have been ironic if Cuba had installed Chinese routers with NSA "backdoors."

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Update 8/28/2015

Reader Ed Francis sent me a link to a 2005 post on Chinese companies in Cuba. The author visited the offices of several Chinese companies, including that of Huawei. The following is a Google Translate version of his observation:

Huawei to enter the Cuban market in 2000, when the company won the bid in an international tender Huawei Cuban government for the construction of a national fiber transmission network are conducted. Although the company is currently in Cuba only two market development officer and six engineers responsible for technical support, but Huawei's products have entered the all Cuban existing telecommunications.

Huawei's office, Interim Head of Cuban Mr. Humberto said Cuba telecom market competition is very fierce, before the market is mainly occupied by Alcatel, Ericsson and other large companies in Europe, I would like to win the market from their hands share of easier said than done. However, with a strong technical strength and highly competitive prices, Huawei has basically heard from a Cuban company became a pivotal role in the market. Cuba Telekom AG is the only company operating fixed telephone service, the total investment in 2004 to purchase 30% of Huawei's products.

It sounds like he is saying that Huawei won a bid for the construction of a fiber backbone in 2000. No details are given, but I wonder if that may be referring to the network pictured above.

The article also says Huawei has an office with two market development officers (salesmen?) and six engineers, headed by a Cuban, Mr. Humberto. (It is my understanding that Chinese infrastructure projects are typically run and staffed by Chinese, which would make this an exception).

I checked on the Huawei and Cuban Chamber of Commerce Web sites, and there is no listing for a Huawei office in Cuba today; however, ZTE does have an office in Havana. (ZTE sold ETECSA 5,000 home modems for the planned DSL rollout and may also be seeking to sell backbone equipment).

Subsequently, an anonymous Cuban writer told me that:

In early 2000 gradually they replaced all Cisco router by Huawei, including my office. probably today 95% of all routers in Cuba are Huawei, a "legacy" of Ramiro Valdez was minister, and the millions that Cuba spent in the "battle of ideas."

. He also said Huawei's office was located in the Miramar Trade Center).

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Update 8/31/2015

Ed Francis has continued his detective work. On LinkedIn, he found that Jorge Rivero Loo has, since 2008, supervised the implementation and technical support of the optical backbone network outlined above. The network uses Huawei equipment and Mr. Rivero has worked for them since 2002. Before that, he worked for ETECSA and studied at Jarcov University (in Russia?) and CUJAE.

Have US firms missed the boat?

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Update 9/8/2015

Ed Francis has turned up more evidence of Huawei equipment -- a Cubatel photo gallery from 2008. Here is one of the photos, along with its caption:

A second photo refers to speeds of 2 and 34 Mb/s:

This facility is referred to as a "node on the national fiber optic network," and, given the year and speeds, I suspect this equipment may have served a metropolitan area network -- perhaps in Havana?

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Update 9/21/2015

Jon Williams, @WilliamsJon, and Michael Weissenstein, @mweissenstein, demonstrated the existence of the high-speed backbone between Havana and the undersea cable landing when they discovered that extra bandwidth had been allocated to access points used by journalists during the Pope's visit:

64 Mb/s from a mobile connection

100 Mb/s from a wired PC

Cuba connecting universities with fiber

Is this the start of a fiber backbone?

Walter Baluja, Director of the Computer Science Department of the Ministry of Higher Education has announced that starting January of 2016 all academic centers in the country will have access to fiber connections. I take that to mean ETECSA will offer them fiber connections, not that all will accept the offer, but I could be wrong.

The article also says universities in Granma and Pinar del Rio already have access to fiber cable, as shown below:

There are two campuses (u in the above map) in Granma and one in Pinar del Rio, so I would guess there is now fiber between Bayamo and the undersea cable (c) at Siboney. There may also be fiber to the second Granma campus in Manzanillo. Similarly, there is probably fiber between Pinar del Rio and a satellite ground station (s) in Havana.

I don't know the location of the Havana ground stations, but found this old picture of a ground station near Havana that communicated with Intersputnik and Intelsat satellites.

Anyone recognize the location?

Baluja said the connected universities have already increased their payment to ETECSA to expand connectivity from "2 to 20 megabytes." I am not sure what he meant by that. First of all, it is common to use megabits per second as a measure of communication speed. Regardless of bits or bytes, 20 is way too slow for fiber links to the campuses. Maybe he was trying to say users were getting 20 mbits per second in labs and offices. He also said they would be installing WiFi LANs on the campuses.

Reading between the lines of press releases is tiring and error prone, but this seems to indicate that Cuba is building a fiber backbone. (I've seen a presentation slide showing planned fiber between Bayamo and the undersea cable).

Chinese equipment is being used for DSL to the home and Wifi access points. I wonder if Chinese equipment is being used in these fiber links. If so, how is Cuba paying for it and what, if anything, are they giving up? Oh -- and where does that leave US vendors?

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Update 7/17/2015

Almost all of Cuba's international traffic is now being carried over the undersea cable at the eastern end of the island, so I guess there is a backbone network connecting Havana and other large cities to the cable landing at Siboney Beach.

Today, that is probably a mix of fiber and wireless links. If there is to be fiber to every university by 2016, does that imply a fiber backbone for the entire island or are some of those fiber links to microwave towers? The same question comes to mind with respect to the WiFi access points in every province.

Vargas Llosa review of "Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground"

Mario Vargas Llosa, an important Peruvian novelist who began as a liberal and later ran as a conservative candidate for president, has written a review of the forthcoming (February 18) book "Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground," by Emily Parker, a former journalist at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

The book reviews the role of the Internet and social media revolutions in China, Cuba and Russia, and Vargas Llosa says:

If Parker’s testimony is accurate, and I believe it is, China is the country, of the three here profiled, where the digital revolution has produced the biggest changes and seemingly unstoppable momentum. Cuba, for its part, is the one where the changes have been the least significant and most vulnerable to reversal.

The title of this book reminds me of the first example of politically oriented citizen journalism that I know of -- the use of Usenet during the Soviet coup attempt of 1991. The Net was used to bring information into and out of Russia and to spread information within Russia. One could read statements like this from Nizhniy Novgorod:

Yesterday at 17:00 a rally in support of Yeltsin was held; regional deputies participated. Today at 17:00 hours there will be a rally in the city center where a strike committee will be formed ... The atmosphere is calm in the city, there are no troops to be seen.

or this from Kiev:

It is relatively quite in Kiev as it all seems like a silly joke from here. On top of this, relevant information is not being supplied on the TV. I was on the central square at 12:30. A group of about 100 people was discussing the news.

China and Cuba made their decisions with respect to control of the Internet in the mid 1990s -- the Chinese opted for a widespread, controlled Internet and the Cubans, mindful of the fall of the Soviet Union, opted to control the spread of and access to the Internet. Where would we be today if Cuba had followed the Chinese lead?

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Update 3/8/2014

Emily Parker was interviewed about her book at the New American Foundation:

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

Chinese technology companies in Cuba -- what are they doing?

Jennifer Hernandez of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami has posted a note on her research on Chinese Technology Companies in Cuba.

She notes that "through bilateral trade agreements, China has been expanding its sphere of influence," and looks at the activities of two large Chinese telecommunication equipment companies, Huawei and ZTE. Much of her emphasis is on surveillance and she concludes that "China’s transfer of technology to Cuba does not necessarily benefit Cubans. Instead China seems to be equipping the island’s information technology infrastructure with systems that can potentially spy on Cubans."

Internet surveilance is pretty well taken for granted in Cuba and China, and it is deplorable, but I wonder about the up side. Are Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese companies also building Internet infrastructure in Cuba?

China was instrumental in installing the ALBA-1 undersea cable between Cuba and Venezuela, but what about infrastructure on the Island? We have spoken earlier of the mismatch between the speed of the undersea cable and the obsolete domestic Internet infrastructure -- the cable is strong link in a weak chain.

That fact had to be understood before work began on the cable, but it went forward regardless. It may be wishful thinking, but I hope Cuba will use the resources and expertise of Huawei and ZTE to strengthen that weak chain by, say, building a Cuban backbone or working to connect key sectors like education and healthcare -- even if they keep an eye on the users.

Will China be helping with domestic Internet infrastructure?

As discussed in a previous post, China has played a major role in financing and installing the undersea cable between Venezuela and Cuba, but there has been little discussion of complementary domestic infrastructure needed to reach beyond the cable landing point.

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (shown here with Raul Castro) is leaving Cuba today after a three-day visit, where he announced a commitment to accelerate fast-growing economic relations between the two nations and committed to an estimated $6 billion investment in oil and natural gas.

The energy agreement was the big news, but, according to China Daily, there were also agreements on "cooperation" in other areas including digital television and telecommunications. There were no details, but perhaps these agreements will provide financing for the domestic infrastructure required to exploit the undersea cable.

Cuba needs a domestic upgrade to utilize the ALBA cable. Will China help?

Commemorating 50 years of Cuba-China relations

The Cuba-Venezuela undersea cable will soon be operational. In our report on the Cuban Internet, we discussed the cable and China's role in its financing and construction. We mentioned a report stating that the cable had been financed with a Chinese loan to Venezuela, and described the Chinese role in its design and installation.

When complete, the cable will increase the speed of Cuba's international connectivity dramatically, but, what of the physical and human infrastructure needed to capitalize on that increase? Cuba's domestic network and the people and organizations that operate it have been working with low-speed, high-latency international connectivity. They are, to a great extent, living in the dial-up access era.

To utilize the capacity of the new cable, they will have to upgrade equipment, organizations, and worker skills. If they do not, the cable will be of limited value -- a strong link in a weak chain.

The Ministry of Informatics and Communications (MIC) and others in Cuba must have plans and programs for upgrading the physical and organizational Internet infrastructure.

For example, we discussed Cuban computer science education in our report, with some focus on the relatively new University of Informatics Science (UCI). UCI places major emphasis on practical work along with education -- I expect (hope) that they are involved in both training for and implementing a strategic upgrade of the domestic network.

In January 2011, MIC was reorganized and later in the month Cuba purchased Telecom Italia's 27 percent share of ETECSA. These moves may indicate a strategic shift toward support of a new domestic network.

But, what of the funding? It was reported that it cost $706 million to buy Telecom Italia out. Those funds are no longer available for domestic network upgrades, but might China play a role in modernizing Cuba's domestic Internet?

Cuba was the first Latin American nation to establish diplomatic relations with China in 1960. At a fifty-year commemoration ceremony, the Chinese pledged to "provide assistance to Cuba to help its social and economic development."

Like the US before it, China has made many investments in developing nations, and they have already participated in the undersea cable project. China has extensive experience building Internet infrastructure at home and to a lesser extent in Africa and other parts of the world. Furthermore, Huawei, a Chinese company, has emerged as a major manufacturer and exporter of Internet equipment.

How will Cuba upgrade its physical and organizational infrastructure to take advantage of the new undersea cable and what will be China's role in developing the domestic Internet in Cuba? Is there a Cuban IT plan?

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My speculation on China should be qualified by the fact that according to a Wikileaked diplomatic memo Cuba-China trade volume fell with the current economic crisis and China is somewhat disillusioned with Cuban finance.

There has been speculation that Cuba is looking for a new foreign partner, perhaps to finance new domestic infrastructure.