Saturday, August 22, 2015

Cuban ICT statistics report for 2014

Cuba's National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) has released their annual report of selected information and communication technology (ICT) indicators, including the following table of physical indicators:


They report that the number of Internet users is over 3 million, but must be including people who access the domestic intranet in that total. There are only 533,900 connected computers, so each one is shared by around 5.6 people. Not only are the users sharing computers, the connections are much slower than we are used to in developing nations. (I don't know how they count smart phone access).

It's also interesting to look at percent changes over time:


We see that the percent of the population with cell coverage has been nearly unchanged since 2010 and completely unchanged since 2012. Evidently, they are no longer expanding the 2G cell network. Presumably, the next deployment will be 4 or 5G. The number of cell phones is growing, but they do not differentiate between modern smart phone/computers and 2G flip and candy-bar phones. Growth in the number of .cu domain names has slowed compared to last year, but it is still substantial, indicating increasing organizational use.

Growth in the number of computers and the number of phone minutes has slowed relative to last year:


Both may be related to the Internet -- people are buying smart phones instead of computers and using Internet applications to make voice over IP calls.

Finally, ONEI reported that there are 1,264,817 fixed phone lines, of which 967,963 are residential. That puts the goal of having DSL service available to 50% of Cuban homes by 2020 in perspective. In addition to installing DSL equipment in central offices, many of these phone lines may have to be upgraded. The number of central offices increased from to 688 to 740 -- perhaps the new ones are already equipped for DSL service.

You can see coverage of previous ONEI ICT reports here.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Real Time Analytics