Cuba USA
Cuban international traffic shifts from satellite to the ALBA-1 undersea cable
Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Dyn Research, sent me a note on Cuba's international traffic. As you see here, on July 1, nearly all satellite traffic (blue and green) was re-routed to the ALBA-1 undersea cable:
As a result, median latency has stabilized at around 210 milliseconds:
This is good news for Cubans who have Internet access at work, school or ETECSA hotspots and navigation rooms.
There must be relatively fast terrestrial connectivity to the cable landing point at Siboney Beach. Does anyone have any information about the nature of that connectivity? Huawei is installing home DSL and WiFi -- have they also installed an inter-province backbone? Could there have been an unannounced deal with medium-earth orbit satellite provider O3b Networks?
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Update 7/20/2015
Huawei may be installing home DSL and WiFi hotspots in Cuba, but Doug Madory has discovererd at least one piece of Cisco equipment -- a 2800 router at the University of Havana. (I'd be curious to know how they obtained it.)
I am not familiar with the Cisco 2800, so I Googled it to get the specs. I was saddened to see that it is old equipment, near the end of its support life -- the end date for software maintenance has already passed and hardware support will end soon.
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Before And After Cuba's Shift To The Alba 1 Undersea Cable
Northwestern researchers Zachary S. Bischof, John P. Rula and Fabian E. Bustamante have published In and out of Cuba, a paper characterizing Cuba's connectivity. They gathered data during March and April 2015 and found that traffic going out of Cuba...
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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,...
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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....
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Has The Alba-1 Undersea Cable Changed Anything?
In January, I posted a note about a blog post by Renesys analyst Doug Madory showing that Cuba had begun testing the ALBA-1 undersea cable. Madory's data shows the round trip "ping" times for packets traveling between Cuba and four other cities. ...
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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...
Cuba USA