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The Cuban CDN

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Re: The Cuban CDN

#61

Post by tuna-piano »

Nutomic wrote: post #36
tuna-piano wrote: post #24

One super funny thing about the Wifi cards referenced in the article that I saw when I was there earlier this year. You are only able to officially buy the wifi cards at certain government offices. Of course, many of these have weird locations, long lines, and inconvenient hours. You also need to show your ID, and there are certain rules about the cards you can buy. Understandably, this has led to an underground Wifi…

I was in Cuba this January, and I didn't get the feel that this was illegal. We bought the cards on a busy street in Havanna with no problems at all. Also, we paid 2 CUC and were told the official price was 1 CUC.

From what I saw a few times, it seemed to be pretty similar to a drug dealer standing on a street corner in a bad part of town in the US. Careful, but still kind of obvious. A couple times they made "pssst" noises to me as they showed me a card. I have no actual idea how much authorities targeted the dealings, besides seeing the level of inconspicuousness of the sales.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#62

Post by dvndvn »

placeybordeaux wrote: post #53

I wonder if mesh networking could take off in Cuba, there is obviously a desire strong enough that a strong sneakernet has evolved. It'd also be interesting to try and create a better UI for distribution of Internet content with latencies of up to 1 week.

We in the western world don't think about smaller limitations. In most countries, all private radio communications are banned. In India, during even first part of last decade, wifi frequencies are illegal for the people to use. Those days, MIT Prof. Nicholas Negroponte made a special trip to India to explain to the people who matter, that don't stupidly implement radio ban on WiFi usage.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#63

Post by dvndvn »

newacct23 wrote: post #27

edit: I'm in the wrong. Cloudflare allowed me to post the comment it just seemed like it was removed because of some delay. Since it seems Cloudflare doesn't like criticisms of the cuban government on their blog I'll repost what I posted here The paquete is censored and only contains harmless information with respect to the government. that is why they don't allow people to implement their own mesh network to create…

> that is why they don't allow people to implement their own mesh network to create their own ad hoc internet.

That is not only why, mesh network requires radio frequency and in Cuba its illegal to deploy radio equipment without permission.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#64

Post by Graphon1 »

Alupis wrote: post #49
CompuHacker wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cubans would benefit from infrastructure in Cuba.

Cubans would benefit from having access to the internet... Cloudflare doesn't provide any of that, nor is a PoP required in Cuba for Cubans to browse websites (even those running behind Cloudflare). Nor will Cubans benefit from a data center being built in Cuba, since majority of said data center's clients will be internationals (not businesses nor people in Cuba). It does seem like a Cloudflare PoP in Cuba is merely…

It seems shortsighted to say "Cubans won't benefit" because international people will benefit first. If more international people go to Cuba, whether for tourism or to invest in businesses, or start businesses, isn't there a benefit to the Cuban people? And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone.

In the US the benefits of the connected network initially reached only the US DoD and its partners. Then university communities. Then early tech companies. Then everyone.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#65

Post by Alupis »

Graphon1 wrote: post #64
Alupis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cubans would benefit from having access to the internet... Cloudflare doesn't provide any of that, nor is a PoP required in Cuba for Cubans to browse websites (even those running behind Cloudflare). Nor will Cubans benefit from a data center being built in Cuba, since majority of said data center's clients will be internationals (not businesses nor people in Cuba). It does seem like a Cloudflare PoP in Cuba is merely…

It seems shortsighted to say "Cubans won't benefit" because international people will benefit first. If more international people go to Cuba, whether for tourism or to invest in businesses, or start businesses, isn't there a benefit to the Cuban people? And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone. In the US the benefits of the connected network initially reached only the US DoD and its par…

> And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone

Yes, but as a paying Cloudflare customer, I'd much rather Cloudflare spend their/my money tangibly improving their service, not propping up a small nation's economy in some sort of idealistic hope that better things will follow.

From my understanding, and from the article's description, most Cubans simply don't have easy access to the internet, or in some cases, no access at all. So putting in data centers which will primarily service foreign corporations seems very imperialistic as well as opportunistic (cheap land, cheap labor, etc).

They need last-mile carriers more than anything, and even though ISP's generally terminate at a data center, there's a whole lot that must happen first before Cubans will feel any benefits.

So, Cloudflare adding a PoP in Cuba by 2017 seems to have zero benefits, for anyone really. Even after Cloudflare does setup a PoP, the benefits to Cubans are minimal-to-none.

Perhaps if Cloudflare is simply itching to burn extra money, they could instead consider lowering the price of their business tier - making it immediately more accessible for more companies. This brings SSL to more sites, protects them from attacks, and can in some cases dramatically improve performance. Those a tangible benefits for the entire internet.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#66

Post by rezashirazian »

I used to live in Iran when I was a child and we had the equivalent of this but for VHS tapes. Once a week, a man with a large suitcase would come by our house. He would set his suitcase on the table, open it up and show us his collection of American and Europeans (and very illegal) movies.

My mom would pick 5-6 and return the tapes we borrowed from the week before. I was very young back then but I remember it vividly. I'd always beg my mom to pick at least one cartoon or a kids movie.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#67

Post by pseingatl »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #22
justratsinacoat wrote: post #14

Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick in my mind: 1. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the equivalent of El Paquete" 2. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old 3. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdata Thus: what the fu…

Does it have to be coming from within Cuba? It could be some guys in Miami.

Some guys in Miami with a T-1 and who then carry a drive into Cuba. There are almost as many flights between Miami and Havana as between Miami and New York. The only restriction was that you have to be Cuban to get on the plane in Miami--there are but few exceptions.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#68

Post by lordnacho »

tuna-piano wrote: post #24

One super funny thing about the Wifi cards referenced in the article that I saw when I was there earlier this year. You are only able to officially buy the wifi cards at certain government offices. Of course, many of these have weird locations, long lines, and inconvenient hours. You also need to show your ID, and there are certain rules about the cards you can buy. Understandably, this has led to an underground Wifi…

I doubt anything will happen to you as long as you keep things discreet.

When I was in Cuba, there were constantly people coming up to me wanting to sell cocaine/lobsters/girls/cigars. It was quite evident that you weren't going to get caught.

Some of them are quite desperate, and they're happy to do business. Interestingly, they told me they really wanted shirts. So basically be happy to swap a shirt for a box of cigars. Also branded clothes like sports jerseys seemed to be something they wanted to barter for.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#69

Post by rdl »

Alupis wrote: post #15
eastdakota wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, it's quite probable. Doubt it'll happen in 2016, but bet it will by the end of 2017.

> we'll have a PoP in Cuba Why though? Cloudflare doesn't have POP's in most countries, and Cuba isn't somehow very advantageous compared to having a POP in Puerto Rico, Florida, Mexico, or any of the more connected Caribbean nations. Is it for the novelty, or am I missing some advantage of setting up infrastructure in Cuba... ?

It will speed Internet access for Cuban users (regular people, government, visitors, etc.). As local access gets liberalized (which seems inevitable), the international links will be contended -- Cuba isn't rich, and there isn't a huge amount of lit connectivity in place between Cuba and Miami yet.

Seems safe to assume that most Cuban users will be accessing US or EU websites. Caching in Cuba, especially for large media content, will make the same amount of international bandwidth cover more users. (The latency between Havana and Miami isn't much, true.)

At some point, assuming more liberalization, there will be more Cuban websites; if those sites use a cache like CloudFlare it will be faster for international visitors, including expat Cubans.

It's at worst a no-op for Cubans, but probably provides some benefit, increasing over time. If a private company is going to pay for it, I don't see what's wrong with it.

(There's already a Miami POP; I'm not sure what Cuban routing is like but I suspect they have a lot of non-US terminating transit for political reasons, which will probably change with time...)

As to why CloudFlare would want to do it: I'm sure there's a novelty/marketing aspect to it. It's also a feel-good thing for employees and the world -- the Cuban situation has been sad, even if you agree with the embargo policy, and doing something to improve the lives of Cubans is awesome. Plus, Cuba is (hopefully) going to rapidly rejoin the world economy, so it will make increasing commercial sense. But you'd have to ask eastdakota/jgrahamc why they want to do it.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#70

Post by greenshackle »

tscs37 wrote: post #12

11MBps for 8$ a month... My ISP is ripping me off! In all seriousness, this is amazing. Once again it proves that nobody should underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of harddrives speeding down the highway... or in this case Cubans exchanging Harddrives.

Have you seen this?

FedEx Bandwidth: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

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