The fiber optic cable will not change Cuba's Internet overnight

[joshcryer]

8. Except, according to latest reports, they opened it up in a third mode.

And speeds in Havana have improved.

Overnight.

For the next week, however, nothing changed. People on the ground in Havana reported no changes in Internet performance. When we wrote our blog on Sunday, it wasn't clear whether this curious one-way connectivity was intentional, or the result of misconfiguration.

Today, that all changed. At exactly 14:01 UTC Tuesday (09:01 local time), we saw yet another mode emerge in the latency diagrams. In this plot, you can see the original pure-satellite mode (A), the new asymmetric satellite mode (B), and a third, lower mode (C) that excludes the possibility of geosynchronous satellite service altogether. At 180-220ms, these paths suggest a pure terrestrial solution, based on subsea and overland cables — the traditional Internet that nearly everyone else on earth enjoys. Almost immediately, we started getting reports from Havana that delays for Internet traffic were dropping perceptibly, as the new routing policy kicked in.

What happened here? We speculate that Cuban network operators changed their routing policy to make the ALBA-1 cable the default path for all outbound traffic from certain Cuban networks. That would align with what we see in the data: some satellite providers, like Intelsat, move from mode A to faster mode B (becoming asymmetric: cable outbound, satellite inbound), while some prefixes move from mode B to still faster mode C (becoming symmetric terrestrial: cable outbound, cable inbound).

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2013/01/cuban-fiber-completo.shtml

Many Cubans have access to a computer (note: access, not ownership necesssarily).

Many Cubans have wifi already connected (for personal LANs to share files and play games; they're not currently connected, but once you have a wifi signal you can connect!):

http://vimeo.com/19402730

The number of Cubans linked to the country's state-controlled intranet jumped more than 40 percent in 2011 compared to the previous year and mobile phone use rose 30 percent, the government reported, even as Cuba's population remained largely cut off from unfettered access to the Internet.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/15/net-us-cuba-telecommunications-idUSBRE85D14H20120615

Connect the intranet to the internet and you're good to go. This often doesn't even require new hardware. It's a routing procedure.