Connection speeds from the LACNIC 25 Conference, hotels and the Google-Kcho Center

The LACNIC 25 Conference was held at the Havana Convention Center (Palacio de Convenciones) this week and Doug Madory, a frequent contributor to this blog, was there and sent me speed tests from the Convention Center and his hotel:

Convention Center speed test

Hotel speed test

Doug also forwarded a hotel speed test run by another attendee, Martin Hannigan, @TheIcelandGuy:

Hotel speed test

Access at the hotels was what we have come to expect -- around 1 mbps -- but connectivity at the Convention Center was much faster. I don't know whether that much bandwidth is always available at the Convention Center or if ETECSA allocated extra resources for this hi-tech conference.

Doug's next speed test was run at the Google-Kcho Center. As shown below, he used one of the center's chromebooks and connectivity was about four times the speed of the hotels.

Google-Kcho center speed test

Doug said there were maybe 4 or 5 chromebooks in use at the time he ran the test -- "Mostly young people on Facebook so not bandwidth intensive."

It is clear from this that the initial report that the center would provide connectivity for 40 simultaneous users at 70 times the speed of ETECSA's public hotspots, was incorrect. My guess is that they should have said 70 mbps backhaul shared among all the users currently online.

Finally, it is interesting to note that all four link speeds are roughly symmetric. We expect download speeds to be faster than upload speeds in the US because we download a lot more than we upload -- about 70% of our downstream, peak-period traffic is streaming entertainment.

But, in Cuba, home connections are over dial-up lines and the connections at public access spots and hotels are too slow for video entertainment. One mbps is fast enough for audio and even low-quality video chats, so symmetric bandwidth makes sense (as long as Cuba has El Paquete for the distribution of entertainment).

Politically correct rhetoric at a technical conference in Cuba

In a recent post, I argued that the US embargo, the poor state of the Cuban economy and fear of free information had stifled the Cuban Internet at its inception in 1996, but that twenty years later, those constraints were significantly reduced. I suggested that the Cuban Internet was being held back by mundane bureaucracy and political correctness.

We got an example of that at the Latin American and Caribbean Network Information Center (LACNIC) conference in Havana this week. LACNIC is one of five regional Internet registries and technology and policy leaders attend their conferences.

LACNIC assigns Internet addresses for networks in the region.

It is noteworthy that LACNIC25 was held in Cuba this year and, since it is a prestigious event, ETECSA was one of the sponsors and ETECSA president Mayra Arevich Marín gave a talk.

She said that the "economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States was the main obstacle to the development of ICT and the Internet in Cuba." She also called for regional cooperation to stop "the illegal use of computer systems of nations by individuals, organizations and states to attack third countries"

Ms. Arevich Marín knows that President Obama has essentially ended restrictions on the export of Internet infrastructure and services to Cuba and they have succeeded in financing and doing business with companies from China and other nations.

I assume the illegal use of computer systems she alluded to are the foolish efforts of USAID -- projects like ZunZuneo and the Alan Gross affair. Again, I think she knows that, had they gone undetected, these projects would have not made a huge difference, but they have been used as propaganda tools.

Bureaucrats in any nation are under pressure to remain politically correct and Cuba's bureaucracy is close to 60 years old. I hope this sort of rhetoric is only for show.