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The Cuban CDN

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Re: The Cuban CDN

#71

Post by amirmc »

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…

And in the wifi hotspots, there'll be a separate network and you pay a dude 1CUC to type in the password (access for 1hr). It's obviously not legit but it works and people get online this way.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#73

Post by pradn »

rezashirazian wrote: post #66

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 vividl…

In Jafar Panahi's excellent film Taxi - a faux-documentary about a taxi driver's day in Tehran, where the driver is played by the director himself - you can see a bootleg video peddler take a ride to a client's place. He even defends his actions to the director (who he recognizes) as promoting free speech.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#74

Post by emilsedgh »

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…

That reminds me of a funny story.

I used to live on Tehran, Iran. All restaurants, stores and businesses must be closed after 12:00 AM in Tehran.

So one night me and a friend were driving around the town in midnight and we were quite hungry. So we found a nice guy selling tea in the winter and there were other people around. We asked them if we can find food anywhere in town in this hour.

One of them gave us an address and told us we should just go there and wait in the car.

We didn't really believe, but we gave it a shot.

I kid you not. At 4:00 AM in the morning, in an alley, we stopped and a sketchy man came over and handed us a menu!

It was fast food. Pizza, burgers and chicken strips. It wasn't really good.

It was a few years ago. Nowadays there are always a few people hanging around and they sometimes open the doors and let people in.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#75

Post by skybrian »

Alupis wrote: post #65
Graphon1 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I haven't used Cloudflare, but aren't you paying to make your website globally available? Good access from Cuba is one small part of that. Maybe not the part you care about, but other people might - that's what happens with bundling.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#76

Post by IntelMiner »

pseingatl wrote: post #67
SmellTheGlove wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A T-1 line? wouldn't it be Cable internet, or more likely Fiber? in Miami, at least

Re: The Cuban CDN

#77

Post by Alupis »

rdl wrote: post #69
Alupis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 me…

> It will speed Internet access for Cuban users

Cloudflare being in Cuba or not will have zero impact on this... unless Cloudflare is getting into the last-mile business (doubtful, but possible).

> As local access gets liberalized (which seems inevitable)

Inevitable, probably, but in 1 year's time - unlikely.

> Caching in Cuba, especially for large media content, will make the same amount of international bandwidth cover more users

This could be the only tangible benefit - except Cloudfare isn't a "nation level" cache, they're a glorified CDN with only some content being "opted-in" to using Cloudflare. So the actual benefit will be minimal (unless Cloudlfare decides to cache all inbound content for the entire nation... which seems unlikely).

> there will be more Cuban websites; if those sites use a cache like CloudFlare it will be faster for international visitors

Cloudflare doesn't need to be in Cuba for this to happen. Frankly, Cloudflare needs to _not_ be in Cuba for this to happen, otherwise it would be no different than a regular hosted server in Cuba (for in-country traffic that is).

> Plus, Cuba is (hopefully) going to rapidly rejoin the world economy,

Cuba never left the world economy -- only the American economy.

Cloudflare isn't an ISP, so Cloudflare putting a PoP in Cuba literally provides zero benefits to Cuba (and it's heavily questionable whether it would provide any benefits to Cloudflare either).

Sure, some money will be exchanged, but it's very likely the data center Cloudflare would colo at would be foreign owned and operated (since Cuba obviously lacks this infrastructure and expertise to build such an infrastructure, let alone maintain one).

> As to why CloudFlare would want to do it: I'm sure there's a novelty/marketing aspect to it

That seems to be the only logical conclusion.

Look, I'm a paying customer and love Cloudflare's service. It made a huge difference for my company's website. But it seems the comment that started this wasn't thoroughly thought through.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#78

Post by Alupis »

skybrian wrote: post #75
Alupis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

I haven't used Cloudflare, but aren't you paying to make your website globally available? Good access from Cuba is one small part of that. Maybe not the part you care about, but other people might - that's what happens with bundling.

> aren't you paying to make your website globally available?

No, any website (unless blocked by a nation-state) is by default accessible globally.

Yes, Cloudflare's CDN offers increased performance for global visitors, but with so few people online in Cuba, there's very little sense in fronting the cost of building all this infrastructure just to have a Cloudflare PoP there. There's many other nations much larger and better connected that CloudFlare does not have a PoP in, so why pick Cuba?

Cubans have bigger concerns than getting a page to load a few milliseconds faster. Getting online in the first place might be a bigger concern for starters...

Re: The Cuban CDN

#79

Post by prdonahue »

Alupis wrote: post #65
Graphon1 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> This brings SSL to more sites, ...

We issue SSL certificates for all plans, including our Free tier, and terminate HTTPS traffic all over the world. You don't need a Business plan for that.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#80

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

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…

So the bandwidth for Cuban consumers is great! The ping, not so much.
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