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. I take that to mean ETECSA will offer them fiber connections, not that all will accept the offer, but I could be wrong.

The article also says universities in Granma and Pinar del Rio already have access to fiber cable, as shown below:

There are two campuses (u in the above map) in Granma and one in Pinar del Rio, so I would guess there is now fiber between Bayamo and the undersea cable (c) at Siboney. There may also be fiber to the second Granma campus in Manzanillo. Similarly, there is probably fiber between Pinar del Rio and a satellite ground station (s) in Havana.

I don't know the location of the Havana ground stations, but found this old picture of a ground station near Havana that communicated with Intersputnik and Intelsat satellites.

Anyone recognize the location?

Baluja said the connected universities have already increased their payment to ETECSA to expand connectivity from "2 to 20 megabytes." I am not sure what he meant by that. First of all, it is common to use megabits per second as a measure of communication speed. Regardless of bits or bytes, 20 is way to slow for fiber links to the campuses. Maybe he was trying to say users were getting 20 mbits per second in labs and offices. He also said they would be installing WiFi LANs on the campuses.

Reading between the lines of press releases is tiring and error prone, but this seems to indicate that Cuba is building a fiber backbone. (I've seen a presentation slide showing planned fiber between Bayamo and the undersea cable).

Chinese equipment is being used for DSL to the home and Wifi access points. I wonder if Chinese equipment is being used in these fiber links. If so, how is Cuba paying for it and what, if anything, are they giving up? Oh -- and where does that leave US vendors?

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Update 7/17/2015

Almost all of Cuba's international traffic is now being carried over the undersea cable at the eastern end of the island, so I guess there is a backbone network connecting Havana and other large cities to the cable landing at Siboney Beach.

Today, that is probably a mix of fiber and wireless links. If there is to be fiber to every university by 2016, does that imply a fiber backbone for the entire island or are some of those fiber links to microwave towers? The same question comes to mind with respect to the WiFi access points in every province.

A leaked ETECSA presentation on home Internet connectivity in Cuba

I don't criticize to knock the system down. On the contrary, I criticize to perfect the system.
Carlos Alberto Pérez

This post has taken several twists and turns.

I started out to write a post commenting on an ETECSA PowerPoint presentation on their plan for home Internet connectivity. The presentation had been leaked by Carlos Alberto Pérez on his blog Chiringa de Cuba on June 23. In addition to some analysis of the plan, I was going to discuss the role of Chinese equipment suppliers, predominantly Huawei.

Then, on June 25, ETECSA denied the validity of the leaked document, saying it was used only for training. They said the tentative prices shown were incorrect, but did not retract the substance of the presentation, which shows a plan to provide DSL service to some Cuban homes using Chinese equipment.

That denial was followed by the blocking of access to Pérez' blog, presumably because he had published the leaked document.

You can no longer access Pérez' post, but the presentation itself has been posted by several people. I have put a copy here, and invite people to add comments to it. (As they say, information wants to be free).

I will provide my reactions to the leaked document here and save the reflections on the Chinese role for a second post.

The presentation says ETECSA plans to roll out asymmetric (faster download than upload) DSL service using Chinese equipment in an unspecified number of central offices. As we see in the following leaked slide, they will use Huawei ME 60 gateways between the phone and IP networks and have ordered 15,000 TP Link TD 8840T modems for homes. I do not know, but it seems reasonable to guess that the digital multiplexers (DSLAMs) installed in the central offices will be from Huawei as well. (I'll get to the question marks later).

The following price slide was included in the presentation, but ETECSA has said this was only a place-holder for training purposes and I will take them at their word -- consider these prices only as possibilities:

These prices may be higher than we eventually see, but there will surely be a significant number of people who cannot afford a DSL connection so we can imagine people sharing accounts and a black market for reselling time.

The following slide differentiates between national and international access, so I presume that the actual prices will take that into account. That would be reasonable since most international access will be over congested satellite links. The slides say nothing about which, if any, international sites will be blocked.

The above slide also differentiates speed levels, times of day and days of the week. I suspect the actual pricing will take time and day into account, but that may or may not be the case for the different speeds that are shown. Varying infrastructure will cause speed differences regardless of price.

Before a home can receive DSL service, the equipment in the central office serving it must be upgraded and a relatively short, high quality phone line must run between the home and its central office. (That is one of the question marks in previous diagram).

Cuba reported 3,882,424 private homes (2012) and 939,500 residential phone lines. That means around 2.9 million homes would have to be wired before they could have Internet service. The presentation says they will give priority to homes that already have land lines and those belonging to the self-employed. (The former is obvious and the latter interesting).

Cuba reports having 688 central offices (2013), few of which contain DSL equipment. Most would have to be upgraded in order to provide DSL service.

Once connected, what will be the data transmission speed? The above slide shows asymmetric (down/up) connection speeds ranging from 128/64 to 8,192/768 kb/s. With DSL technology, transmission speed depends upon the distance of a home from its central office and the condition of the copper lines connecting them. These are always best effort numbers -- "up to" the stated speeds.

Let me give an example, I live Los Angeles and Google Maps says I am 1.1 mile from my central office. Verizon offers me two service levels: "high speed" DSL service is .5-1 mb/s and "enhanced" service is from 1.5-3 mb/s, for an extra $10 per month. To be fair, the copper in my neighborhood is 70 years old, but I doubt that many Cuban customers will be able to get 8,192 kb/s.

There is also a slide showing day/night and weekday/weekend traffic patterns. Judging from the y-axis, I am guessing that this is showing international traffic, which is heavy during week days. Before a user logs on, he or she will be able to measure their current connection speed before starting a session and using their hours.

The Internet connection is the second question mark in the previous diagram. What are the connection speeds between the central offices and the Internet? In the US, central offices are connected by high speed fiber, but I know little about Cuba. For example, in Havana, some or all central offices may be connected to a fiber backbone, but what of the link from there to the Internet? Havana is far from the undersea cable landing to the east, so I imagine those links are via congested satellites.

The bottom line is that this is an early step toward modern home connectivity using yesterday's technology and I hope Cubans are planning to leapfrog today's technology in the long run.

Well, that is a little tea reading from the leaked slides. It is too bad that the situation is so opaque that we have to guess about ETECSA and their plans and it is even worse that they seem to have blocked Pérez' blog. He is an asset, not a threat -- as he has stated "I don't criticize to knock the system down. On the contrary, I criticize to perfect the system."

I think the involvement of Chinese suppliers is more interesting than this leak, and I will take that up in a subsequent post.

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Update 6/29/3025

Ted Henken told me that the problem with accessing Chiringadecuba.com may not have been government blocking but expiration of the domain name, and it seems he was correct.

I did a whois lookup and it turns out the domain expiration date was 2015-06-26. I then checked at the registrar, Name.com, and saw that chiringadecuba.com is not available. It sounds like it may have expired, but they are giving Perez a grace period within which to re-activate it. Since he would not have a US credit card, there may be some difficulty with that.

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Update 6/29/2015

Chiringadecuba.com is online again and the expiration date has been extended till next year. My apologies to ETECSA for fearing that they may have blocked access.

What is the effect U.S. trade restrictions on IT exports to Cuba?

The Senate Finance Committee is researching the economic impact of U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba and I was asked to testify before the US International Trade Commission on the effects of the U.S. restrictions on our exports of telecommunication equipment and services to Cuba. I have a chance to revise the testimony, and would appreciate feedback.

Click to download Word or PDF versions of the draft.

Here is the testimony introduction:

The Commission has asked for testimony on the effects of the U.S. trade restrictions on our telecommunication exports to Cuba. Since there is a great deal of uncertainty about the Cuban plans and policies and U.S. policy is also in a state of flux, I will lay out a framework for discussing the issue rather than attempting specific predictions. This framework can be modified and fleshed out by future research. I will focus on Internet-based telecommunications, which are subsuming traditional telephony.

Potential U.S. exports to Cuba include:

• Personal Internet access devices
• Internet services for fees or advertising
• Internet infrastructure
• Internet service provision
• Digital entertainment and other content
• Sensor-based Internet access devices – “the Internet of things.”

Some of these markets, for example, providing Internet infrastructure and service, are more severely impacted by U.S. restrictions than others.

U.S. restrictions are only one impediment to the sale of these goods and services – there are others that are out of our control:

• Cuban government fear of free information exchange
• The Cuban economy
• The absence of domestic Internet infrastructure
• Socialist values and practices
• Foreign competition
• Domestic competition from state monopolies

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Update 6/26/2015

An anonymous reader has the opinion that my testimony document underestimates the potential of the Cuban market. They listed the following examples:

Web hosting service -- the reader is "middle man" for ten Web sites hosted in Canada and knows of many others.

Specialized professional audio/video equipment that is only made in US, or were US products traditionally have much better quality. Examples include products from Avid, M-Audio and Alesis. Their products are sometimes bought by Cuban companies in third countries using a foreign nationals or foreign companies as middle man. Other times they have to settle for lower quality products from China or Europe.

Computer assisted Medical equipment -- this is a big opportunity because the Cuban government spends a lot on health care every year

Specialized Software -- for example Oracle databases, which are pervasive in Cuba.

The reader went on to say that some US companies refuse to sell their products to Cuban even in foreign countries. For example Dell dealers refuse to sell laptops to people with Cuban passports in Madrid and Barcelona.

Note that the specialized software is pirated, as is much of the software and content distributed in the weekly "paquete." Copyright infringement will be an issue in any discussion of liberalization of US trade policy. Also note that the medical and audio/video equipment is sold primarily to government enterprises, not private individuals or cooperatives.

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Update 1/16/2016

The FCC has removed Cuba from its exclusion list, opening the door for U.S. telecom carriers to provide facilities-based telephone and Internet service to Cuba without separate approval from the Commission. (Cuba was the last remaining country on the Commission’s
Exclusion List).

The ball is in Cuba's court, but I do not expect them to pick it up any time soon.

Dreaming -- this would be a good time for ETECSA to experiment with satellite Internet as an interim measure.

Cuba's WiFi access plan raises intresting questions.

Do we see the outline of a future national fiber backbone?

Luis Manuel Díaz Naranjo, ETECSA Director of Communications, has announced that during the coming weeks, they plan to roll out 35 WiFi access points. As shown here, they will be distributed throughout the island.

Forthcoming WiFi access locations -- hint of a backbone?

Mr. Díaz said the access points would accommodate 50-100 or more simultaneous users at speeds up to "1MB" per second. (I assume he means megabit, not megabyte). He also announced that ETECSA's hourly access charge would be permanently cut to 2 CUC. This is evidently a rollout of an earlier trial in Santiago de Cuba.

While these access points are not yet operating, Carlos Alberto Pérez has spotted the equipment at one of the Havana locations. The equipment is supplied by the Chinese company Huawei, which is bad news for US companies.

Three Huawei WiFi antennae in Havana

That is all I know about this new Cuban path to the Internet, but it raises several interesting questions and points.

For a start, how do they achieve backhaul speeds to support 50-100 simultaneous users at up to 1 mb/s at an access point? The announcement makes it clear that some access points will be more powerful than others. Assuming they allow international access, are some linked to the undersea cable and others linked to satellites?

Regardless of the international link, how is the link made from the access point to the international connection -- fiber, copper, wireless, a combination? The answer will differ for each access point. Looking back at the above map, do we see the outline of a future national fiber backbone?

I have seen a couple of presentation slides showing a four-phase "planned" fiber backbone connecting many of the provinces shown on the access-point map. Eight of them are included in the first phase of the backbone.

Another question has to do with the equipment vendor, Huawei. Lina Pedraza Rodríguez, Cuban Minister of Finance and Prices, said that Cuba is in "very advanced" negotiations with Huawei, at the recent World Economic Forum on Latin America.

Could she have been referring to the wireless and backhaul equipment for these access points? Might she have been thinking of a possible upgrade to DSL of Cuba's telephone central offices, as suggested by the announced plan to make low-speed broadband connectivity available to half of the homes in Cuba by 2020? Or could she have been thinking of the plan to connect all Cuban schools or even a national fiber backbone like the one in the slides I saw?

Regardless, one wonders how the work will be financed, what sort of concessions ETECSA has made, and what this means for US telecommunication equipment and service providers who hope to do business in Cuba. I assume the installation is being done by ETECSA employees -- I hope they are hiring some of the folks who have been building out unauthorized WiFi LANS.

Will the government block access to some sites and services? Freedom House ranks the Cuban Internet as not free for political and cultural reasons, but there is also the possibility of blocking access for economic reasons. For example Skype and FaceTime are blocked in Cuba. Could that be to protect ETECSA phone call revenue?

Skype recommends 100 kb/s upload and download speed with reasonable latency. As Doug Madory has shown, Cuban undersea cable links have a latency of around 200 milliseconds, so Skype would work for international calls from cable-connected access points.

Latencies: 600 msec satellite (A), 200 msec cable (C)

Other developing nations have faced this same tradeoff. My favorite example was India during the mid 1990s when voice calls over the Internet were explicitly illegal, yet shops offering the service advertised in the newspaper and had signs on their storefronts.

This is a major rollout by Cuban standards, but it is a drop in the bucket. Does it signify a policy shift? The overriding question has to do with the goal of the Cuban government. Is the goal to remain in power, maximize ETECSA profit, maximize government profit, transfer wealth to ETECSA investors, etc. or is it to provide affordable, modern Internet connectivity to the Cuban people?

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Update 6/22/2015

The WiFi hotspot in Santiago de Cuba is on line and this report makes it sound like the connection is quite slow and congested at peak hours -- whether hard wired or by WiFi. That is a bad sign -- if Santiago is not connected to the undersea cable, which region is?

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Update 6/28/2015

The photo of three Huawei WiFi antennae shown above is from the blog of Carlos Alberto Pérez, but his blog is no longer accessible online.

On June 23, Pérez published a leaked document -- a presentation on ETECSA's plan for home Internet connectivity. ETECSA has denied the validity of the leaked document, saying it was used for training. They said the tentative prices shown were incorrect, but did not retract the substance of the presentation, which shows plans to provide DSL service to some Cuban homes using Chinese equipment.

It seems likely that Pérez' blog was blocked because he published the leaked document.

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Update 7/3/2015

The new WiFi hotspots are now online. If you have used one, let me know what the speed and user experience was like.

Cuba's broadband connectivity plan

The International Telecommunication Union advocates nations formulating broadband plans. They stated the case for broadband planning in a 2013 report on the correlation between national broadband plans and citizens’ access to affordable service. In a subsequent report, they surveyed the state of national planing and found that 140 nations had national plans, 13 were working on them and 43 were not.

Cuba was one of the 13 in the process of planning, and the Ministry of Communication has now drafted a national plan for developing broadband infrastructure and the executive summary was leaked on the Chirnadecuba blog.

They define broadband as a connection speed of at least 256 kbit/s, saying that will advance to 2,048 kbit/s (download) by 2025 and 10 mbits/sec (download) by 2030. For comparison, the Federal Communication Commission revised the US definition of broadband from 4 mbits/s download and 1 mbits/s upload to 25 mbits/s download and 3 mbits/s upload and Google Fiber and others are rolling out 1 gbit/s up and down in selected cities.

This is indicative of a DSL roll-out in Cuba, which I have advocated earlier as a short run step toward a modern Internet, but the 2030 goal strikes me as low for 15 years from now. I am also struck with the mention of download speed, but not upload speed -- a nation of content creators would want fast upload as well.

The plan includes lists of conceptual and economic barriers in the way of broadband connectivity and goals like connecting institutions and homes, improving cybersecurity and the environment and improving university and research connectivity. Each goal has a list of specific objectives like connecting every university and research institute to the national research and education network at a speed of at least 256 kbit/s for 30% of the users and 2 mbit/s for 70% of the users.

There are also lists of implementation guidelines, recommendations like evaluate building another Internet exchange and check the prices of personal computers and smart phones. There are also two resolutions -- approve this plan by June 22, 2015 and prepare an implementation timetable by October 2015. There was no mention of who should approve it and no request for comments.

This is just the executive summary -- I have not seen the full document. It is far from an implementable action plan and it raises more questions than it answers -- for example, when they say "Internet connectivity," do they mean international Internet connectivity and, if so, is it over satellite or undersea cable? Still. it is more than we are used to seeing from Cuba. Hopefully we will learn a lot more in October.

Cubans announce the formation of an IT professional society -- the Unión de Informáticos de Cuba (UIC)

There are differences between Cuba's IT professional society and the Association for Computing Machinery in the US.

The formation of the Unión de Informáticos de Cuba (UIC) was announced during a plenary session at the First National Workshop on Computerization and Cybersecurity in Havana. Over 7,500 computer professionals also watched via a teleconference (no mean feat in Cuba).

My first reaction upon hearing the news was "cool -- it's a professional society like our Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)," but after reading more I realize that there are differences between ACM and UIC, reflecting cultural/bureaucratic differences between the US and Cuba and the fact that ACM was established 68 years ago. Let's look at some of the differences.

The UIC was established by the Cuban Ministry of Communication, which also controls the Internet and telephone systems, while ACM was established at a meeting at Columbia University in 1947.

ACM is a professional society -- it's tagline is "advancing computing as a science and a profession" -- while UIC feels like a professional/political organization. As Yoani Sanchez points out, the membership application form asks for political affiliations like membership in the Communist Party or Young Communist Union. Can you imagine ACM asking whether a member is a Republican or Democrat?

The UIC membership application asks for political affiliations (red added).

People have to apply to be accepted into the UIC and they may be dropped for infractions like violation of the code of ethics. An applicant has to complete a form by July 15, attach a photo, copy of their diploma and a CV, then wait to see if the application is accepted. Bill Gates or Steve Jobs could not have applied and I am not sure if, say, a biologist who did computer modeling would be eligible.

One joins ACM by filling out the following form online and paying the first year dues.

Members are expected to have either a bachelor's degree, the equivalent level of education or two years full-time employment in the IT field, but no one checks up on this. There is also an optional profile in which one specifies professional specialties and interests, but the information is used for allocating ACM resources (and perhaps selling ads), not for screening applicants.

The UIC is a Cuban organization, open only to Cubans, while ACM is global, with chapters in 57 nations.

ACM has 138 active chapters

ACM reaches out to young people via student chapters on college campuses and, while UIC does not yet have student chapters, Cuba devotes significant resources to training potential computer users and professionals via a well-established system of Youth Computer Clubs (YCCs). The government established 32 YCCs in 1987 and today over 2.25 million kids and adults have completed courses (and played games) at 611 YCCs.

ACM offers concrete benefits including the monthly Communications of the ACM magazine, online access to articles, books, videos, webinars and courses and membership in over 170 special interest groups. ACM was formed in 1947 so they have had 68 years to organize and capitalize -- what will UIC be offering members 68 years from now?