Year end interview of the president of ETECSA

"The people want to be connected."

ETECSA president, ingeniera Mayra Arevich Marín

Maya Arevich Marín has been president of ETECSA for four years. The following are a few points from a recent year-end interview.

• Interent access was improved through the rollout of Nauta rooms, WiFi hotpsots and improved connectivity at institutions that are important to the society.
• By the end of the year, there will be 65 WiFi hotspots and they will add 80 more during 2016.
• Today there are over 700 public access points in navigation rooms, cyber-cafes, hotels and airports.
• Average daily access is over 150,000 people -- double last year.
• They are encouraging the move to permanent Nauta accounts and hiring agents at WiFi hotspots to stop resellers. They are also experimenting with having people at the WiFi hotspots to assist customers. (It takes time to train support and marketing people).
• They are also working on a system to let people buy time online rather than through an agent. (It seems they could have done this from the start -- send a 2 CUC text message to ETECSA in return for a 1-hour passcode).
• They are working on infrastructure to support this access. They have expanded the capacity of their existing data center and will build two new datacenters and augment backbone access to the international undersea cable in 2016. (She did not mention it, but the bulk of Cuba's international traffic shifted from satellite to cable this year, enabling the increase in access).

In addition to access, she mentioned new applications and improved connectivity in several government sectors:

• There are now 40 thousand doctors who connect from their homes to the Internet via Infomed. They also improved the connectivity of health institutions.
• The Ministry of Justice is putting applications like access to municipal records online.
• Fiber connectivity has been provided at over 25 higher education facilities. By the end of the year, all Cuban universities were connected.
• An interbank network was created and banking applications implemented. There are now 773 ATMs in Cuba, 150 of which were installed this year.
• The Attorney General's office, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Institute of Water Resources and BioCubaFarma business group have improved fiber connectivity.
• She said they are preparing new service offerings for 2016, but did not say what they were.

Entertainment is one critical application that was not mentioned. Today digital entertainment is being handled off line by El Paquete, but normalization of relations with the US will at some point eliminate the piracy subsidy upon which it is based, leaving a cost gap.

Finally, Arevich Marín said that since they must pay for infrastructure and equipment with convertible currency, they need to continue generating revenue through expensive service, foreign recharging, exportable services, international voice and roaming charges and government subsidy.

In a way, this was a typical year-end summary by any CEO -- mentioning achievements for the year past and hinting at some plans for the coming year, while ignoring problems.

Viewed from the perspective of the Internet in a developed nation, I am saddened by how little connectivity Cubans have, but I am more interested in where Cuba will be five or more years from now, so, for me, the key point in this interview was the last one -- citing the need for convertible currency. It is an indication that, at least for now, Cuba has decided to be relatively self-sufficient with respect to the Internet, but can they afford a self-sufficient Internet?

The conventional wisdom is that if Cuba wants to expand the Internet quickly, they should privatize and regulate the Internet in return for foreign investment. For example, Doug Madory has suggested licensing mobile providers, an approach that has led to rapid improvement of the mobile Internet in Myanmar, another "green field" nation. Cuba is seeking foreign investment in industries like mining and oil production, but the Internet is basic domestic infrastructure that might reasonably be kept independent. They should consider alternatives for infrastructure ownership and regulation along with foreign investment.