Growing pains for mobile email

Granma reports that demand for nauta.cu email from mobile phones (100.000 new users) has led to congestion on the cellular network of "over 500" base stations, so ETECSA is expanding the network. They will add 80 new base stations -- 15 are already online.

Congestion is not the only problem they are facing. It seems many of the phones ETECSA sells do not support GPRS and ETECSA support staff are not trained to cope with the variety of phones people have.

I don't doubt that they will correct these problems, but we are still talking about 3G service in limited geographic areas. As I've suggested earlier, upgrading to modern infrastructure would require significant investment and perhaps legalizing satellite access could bridge the gap.

(Thanks to Doug Madory for the tip).

Windows XP lives on in Cuba

Isbel Diaz Torres reports that, in spite of Microsoft stopping support last week, Windows XP "refuses to go" in Cuba.

Evidently, XP remains the most common operating system in Cuba. Torres notes that Windows 7 and 8 have been slow to catch on because of memory requirements, quipping that "at this very second, someone may be setting up a 486 and installing Windows 95 in it on the island."

The article describes efforts by the government and UCI to move people toward open source software, but it seems that Linux is not widely used.

This article reminded me of an earlier post on the cost of obsolete technology in Cuba.

It also reminded me of a recent post by Yoani Sánchez on essential iOS applications. One would expect her to be talking about essential Android applications -- are there more iPhones than Android phones in Cuba?

I don't expect that folks in Cuba were getting patches and upgrades to their XP installations, so the cessation of support is not big news there.