Cuba USA
Last week I received an email from Doug Madory of Renesys Corporation, the Internet monitoring company. Doug is the analyst who, last May, provided us with smoking-gun evidence that the ALBA-1 undersea cable was not carrying Internet traffic.
Doug says there has been "no change on connectivity in Cuba. Still all satellite." He promises to keep an eye on the situation and let us know if it changes.
He also provided a link to a post entitled "What Happened to the Cable? Cubans Discuss Internet Access" on Global Voices, a portal for blogs and citizen media.
The post links to a number of Cuban blogs with posts about the cable and notes that, after much interest and hype, the news has gone silent. Consider, for example, this post from the blog From Inside Cuba. The post chronicles the coverage of the cable in the blog Cubadebate starting in 2007 and suddenly stopping in 2011. It concludes with a long list of pointed questions.
This post is consistent with what we have observed earlier and the fact that Minisiter of Informatics and Communication Maimir Mesa said nothing about the cable in his recent report to Parliament.
On the surface it seems that $70 million was spent on a cable that was installed with no thought of how it would be used or what sort of domestic infrastructure would be needed to exploit it, and then, it was abandoned.
One has to ask what is going on. I am not a journalist, but, if I were, I would follow the money. Posts in PSLWeb, The Cable Directory and BNAmericas (account required), make it sound like the funding was provided in a $70 million loan from China to Venezuela.
Did the $70 million come from the Chinese taxpayer? If not, where did it come from? How much of it went to Alcatel Lucent for their work? How much to people in China, Cuba and Venezuela and who got it? It seems there may be invisible hands in socialist economies as well as capitalist.
- Tata Switches From Satellite To Cable And Fidel Likes To Surf The Web
Doug Madory of Renesys, an Internet monitoring company, has reported that Cable and Wireless is no longer carrying traffic between Jamaica and Cuba, Telefonica is carrying less traffic than previously, and Tata is carrying more. Furthermore, the Tata...
- Cuba-jamaica Link Of The Undersea Cable Is Operational
Doug Madory of Renesys reports that the Cuba-Jamaica link of the ALBA-1 cable is carrying Cable and Wireless (C&W) traffic. The first plot shows Transit, a Renesys-defined metric which is a function of several variables and may be interpreted as...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
Cuba USA
What's up with the ALBA-1 cable? Time to follow the money.
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| MIC Minisiter Maimir Mesa commenting on the ALBA-1 cable |
Doug says there has been "no change on connectivity in Cuba. Still all satellite." He promises to keep an eye on the situation and let us know if it changes.
He also provided a link to a post entitled "What Happened to the Cable? Cubans Discuss Internet Access" on Global Voices, a portal for blogs and citizen media.
The post links to a number of Cuban blogs with posts about the cable and notes that, after much interest and hype, the news has gone silent. Consider, for example, this post from the blog From Inside Cuba. The post chronicles the coverage of the cable in the blog Cubadebate starting in 2007 and suddenly stopping in 2011. It concludes with a long list of pointed questions.
This post is consistent with what we have observed earlier and the fact that Minisiter of Informatics and Communication Maimir Mesa said nothing about the cable in his recent report to Parliament.
On the surface it seems that $70 million was spent on a cable that was installed with no thought of how it would be used or what sort of domestic infrastructure would be needed to exploit it, and then, it was abandoned.
One has to ask what is going on. I am not a journalist, but, if I were, I would follow the money. Posts in PSLWeb, The Cable Directory and BNAmericas (account required), make it sound like the funding was provided in a $70 million loan from China to Venezuela.
Did the $70 million come from the Chinese taxpayer? If not, where did it come from? How much of it went to Alcatel Lucent for their work? How much to people in China, Cuba and Venezuela and who got it? It seems there may be invisible hands in socialist economies as well as capitalist.
- Tata Switches From Satellite To Cable And Fidel Likes To Surf The Web
Doug Madory of Renesys, an Internet monitoring company, has reported that Cable and Wireless is no longer carrying traffic between Jamaica and Cuba, Telefonica is carrying less traffic than previously, and Tata is carrying more. Furthermore, the Tata...
- Cuba-jamaica Link Of The Undersea Cable Is Operational
Doug Madory of Renesys reports that the Cuba-Jamaica link of the ALBA-1 cable is carrying Cable and Wireless (C&W) traffic. The first plot shows Transit, a Renesys-defined metric which is a function of several variables and may be interpreted as...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...