Venezuela: Fiber-Optic Cable to Cuba Is Working

[Bacchus4.0]

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/venezuela-fiber-optic-cable-cuba-working-16426820


An undersea fiber-optic cable that was laid last year between Venezuela and Cuba is working, a Venezuelan government official said Thursday.

The cable was rolled out starting in Venezuela and reached eastern Cuba in February 2011. But 10 months after the system was supposed to have gone online, Cuba's government has not recently mentioned the cable, and the Internet on the island remains the slowest in the Western Hemisphere. The link had been expected to promptly improve the speed of the Internet in Cuba.

Jorge Arreaza, Venezuela's science and technology minister, said that "a few months ago we signed all the remaining protocols, all the necessary security measures with the Cuban government."

"It's absolutely operational. It will depend on the Cuban government what it uses it for. Of course that's their sovereign matter, but we know that the undersea cable is in full operation," Arreaza told reporters.

[joshcryer]

1. Of course it is working. It was working 3 months ago.

The first thing you do when you lay cable is to hook it up, to make sure it works! IP's were likely propagated and DNS was likely set up within a few days of the cable making landfall. The entire infrastructure was likely already set up. You don't just roll a cable out and pow, magically have it.

Cuba is such a small country they could roll it out wirelessly in weeks. Hell, they can just give it to the people and since they already have thousands of clandestine networks set up all they would have to do is put the wifi points in ad hoc mesh mode (which any good router can do, install DD-WRT on it, if the firmware doesn't originally have it). Pow, you just gave internet to an entire city.

The bloggers predicted months ago that the fiber wouldn't be hooked up for the masses. It's not for the citizens, it's for the elites, for the most part. To roll it out for the masses would require a lot of planning to be able to monitor activities as the Cuban government has done in the past.

[naaman fletcher]

2. Didn't Vodafone or someone else lay a cable

That Cuba has not turned on?