![]() ![]() The recommendation describes the government of Cuba as “a foreign adversary that poses a national security threat to the United States.” Make no mistake the Cuban government is an authoritarian regime that represses political dissent, and the two countries’ governments have been adversaries for decades. It is safe to say that as a result of this recommendation, the ARCOS cable will not build a segment to Cuba, leaving the country almost completely reliant on a single submarine cable. According to their recommendation, building such an extension would create “immitigable risks to the national security and law enforcement interests of the United States.”ĪRCOS submarine cable from Unfortunately, the technical rationales provided in the published decision reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of how the logical internet and its underlying physical infrastructure work together. The latest chapter in the saga of the Cuban internet came last month, when the US Department of Justice’s Team Telecom published their recommendation that the FCC deny a request by the ARCOS submarine cable system to add a segment that would connect Cuba to the cable. While Cuba has been a repressive state for many years, it wasn’t until the past two years that the country felt the need to shut down services to counteract protests. In fact, the internet became important enough that the Cuban government began cutting service following the largest anti-government protests in decades in the summer of 2021. But adoption grew enough to enable Cubans to start enjoying a freedom of communication that many in other countries around the world expect and sometimes take for granted. In the intervening decade, internet adoption in Cuba grew at an anemic pace: from relying on internet cafes and wifi hotspots to the eventual activation of 3G mobile service in December 2018. During my participation in LACNIC 19 in Medellin, Colombia, a few months later, I was introduced to the Director of ETECSA, who confessed that his engineers fixed the asymmetric routing snafu after seeing my blog post. This misconfiguration appeared to have been resolved when the latencies dropped further a few days later. ![]() When we published our initial report on the ALBA-1 activation, we speculated on why the latencies weren’t even lower than what we were observing: We believe it is likely that Telefonica's service to ETECSA is, either by design or misconfiguration, using its new cable asymmetrically (i.e., for traffic in only one direction). This graphic from my presentation at NANOG 57 in February 2013 captures the migration of latency measurements to Cuba observed from one of Renesys’s measurement servers. When I checked our active measurements into Cuba that traversed this new link, we observed latencies that were impossibly low for a round-trip time over geostationary satellite. I configured my internet monitoring tools to look for any new connection into Cuba, and a year later, it found one - a new BGP adjacency between Cuban state telecom ETECSA (AS11960) and Spanish telecom giant Telefonica (AS12956). It was a mystery closely followed by Cuba watchers everywhere. However, as the months progressed, there remained no evidence that the new cable had made any difference for the Cuban internet. The ALBA ( Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de nuestra América) cable experienced numerous delays but was eventually designated RFS (ready-for-service) in February 2011. In 2007, a joint Cuba-Venezuela venture announced its intention to construct an undersea fiber optic cable to Cuba by 2009. Ultimately, it was the Venezuelan government (ally to Cuba and adversary to the U.S.) that put up the money to build a submarine cable to improve Cuba’s connection to the internet. ![]() In contrast to undersea fiber optics, geostationary satellite service offers lower capacity with significantly higher latencies, all at a higher cost per Mb - not great for a developing nation’s sole source of internet service. As a result, the Cuban internet was completely dependent on geostationary satellites to reach the outside world. At that time, the cable had reportedly been constructed but was inexplicably laying dormant for over a year, prompting intense suspicion and speculation about its status.Īs the world became more connected, Cuba had been excluded from every previous submarine cable system in the Caribbean due to the U.S. ALBA-1 submarine cable from I first learned of the mystery of the ALBA-1 submarine cable from The Internet in Cuba blog of Larry Press, computer science professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. ![]()
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