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The Cuban CDN

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Re: The Cuban CDN

#91

Post by stavros »

emilsedgh wrote: post #74
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 addre…

Similar story, I was in Barcelona, and if you walk around the beach at night, you see dodgy-looking immigrants that will approach you and quietly ask if you want a cold beer.

See, it's illegal for stores to sell alcohol past a certain hour, so these guys provide a valuable service. However, I was with a friend who wanted to smoke some weed instead, so he went and asked one of the guys "do you have any weed?"

The guy looked horrified and quickly blurted out "No, no, only beer! You can't get that stuff!" before moving along.

It just struck me as funny that they would dodgily sell you illegal beer but that they would be righteously indignant at weed. "That, sir, is where I draw the line of illegality!"

Re: The Cuban CDN

#92

Post by lerpa »

IntelMiner wrote: post #76
pseingatl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Fiber

It's most likely Fidel.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#93

Post by lerpa »

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…

There is a documentary called "Chuck Norris vs. Communism" on Netflix about this.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#94

Post by smallnamespace »

stavros wrote: post #91
emilsedgh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 addre…

Similar story, I was in Barcelona, and if you walk around the beach at night, you see dodgy-looking immigrants that will approach you and quietly ask if you want a cold beer. See, it's illegal for stores to sell alcohol past a certain hour, so these guys provide a valuable service. However, I was with a friend who wanted to smoke some weed instead, so he went and asked one of the guys "do you have any weed?" The guy…

Maybe it's righteous indignation, or maybe they don't know your friend isn't an undercover cop.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#95

Post by jdietrich »

fiatjaf wrote: post #81
dandelany wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the same last October. It's definitely illegal, only ETECSA kiosks are allowed to sell the cards. But resellers are ubiquitous and it seems that the authorities mostly turn a blind eye.

Like in all other mixed economies, EVERYTHING is illegal, but the authorities mostly turn a blind eye. EXCEPT when they want to destroy your life or make you suffer for any reason, then they'll look at you specifically.

It's not just mixed economies:

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...

Re: The Cuban CDN

#96

Post by ma2rten »

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…

One of the comments in the article explained it: there not actually 1TB of new stuff but only about 200G each week. They also have multiple people download it and then combine it before it gets distributed.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#97

Post by vidarh »

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... ?

> Why though?

Cuba has 1/4 of the population of the Caribbean in one relatively small location.

Look at their network map [1] and you see they already cover major locations in South America, and has good coverage of the US, but Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean is a blan spot.

Looking at their worldwide location, my guess is that they pick their POPs largely based on whether they see a potential for cutting latency for their customers based on a mix of population size and the local transit situation.

In the US, it's relatively sparse. Probably because you don't gain much by increasing the number, as you can solve most latency issues within the US by buying more expensive transit from established backbone providers or peering directly with major ISPs at a relatively low number of peering points.

So lots of POPs == either high population or shitty latency over the regular network coupled with poor peering opportunities or other ways of cutting latency without putting actual servers in a rack. Or both.

Cuba is interesting - as someone has pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the plane traffic between the US and Cuba is quite substantial despite the travel limitations, because of the large Cuban exile community.

If Cuba liberalises network connections, chances are that despite the small current number of Cuban internet users, it would explode quickly, and that there would be a lot of US based businesses that might look to Cloudflare if Cloudflare could cut their latency.

Given the size of the Cuban population, it wouldn't take a large proportion of the population to make it the best contender for a first POP in the Caribbean.

My guess is that Cloudflare is looking to add a lot more POPs over the next few years anyway (EDIT: Supported by finding an announced from when they set up a POP in Kuala Lumpur: In September 2015 that was their 45th POP; today their map shows 83; if they add POPs at the same rate or faster until 2017, they'll be past running out of locations more suitable than a liberalised Cuba), and if you look at the empty spots on the map, and mark those areas with high population density and poor peering situation, I'd not at all be surprised if Cuba start looking quite good in the "if just they fix these couple of issues" (from the point of view of putting a POP in - I'm not trying to trivialise their problems) category.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map/

Re: The Cuban CDN

#98

Post by tech-no-logical »

so, when you did have access to the internet, did the cloudflare captchas drive you as crazy as they do me ? how was the cpm (capthas per minute) ?

seriously : it seems cloudflare drives about 90% of the sites I visit, judging from the "I'm not a robot" questions and captchas I get. congrats on the market share.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#99

Post by navs »

We never had something nearly as elaborate as this but in Fiji, having anything more than dial up was considered a luxury. Portable Hard Drives weren't as common and USB sticks didn't store as much as they do now. It was all about burning CDs and handing them to friends at school/work. I think this might be the reason why most bus drivers in Fiji have the same damn songs playing ad nauseam.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#100

Post by vidarh »

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,…

Most Cubans don't have internet access today because $2 for wifi access is a lot of money, and there are still restrictions, and you either buy it illegally or show your id at a government office and face the risk that someone has decided to pay attention to you.

But the success of things like in this article shows that there are a lot of desire for access, which means that once internet connectivity is liberalised and prices tumble, there is likely to be a large demand quite quickly. Yet from a population that is not likely to be able to pay for large upgrades to external links very quickly.

That's an ideal scenario for Cloudflare, in that you'll have demand from Spanish-language businesses outside Cuba to reach a market that once the floodgates opens is likely to grow very rapidly, especially due to the sheer amount of people in the US with connections to the island. If you can broker reduced latency, it will be a big competitive factor for Spanish language businesses that wants to target Cuba but doesn't want to put servers locally.

So don't worry. I doubt Cloudflare is hoping to burn your money to make a political statement (though who knows, it might very well pay for itself in PR), but rather is looking at it in terms of actual business potential.

Also, I don't know what the minimum size of a Cloudflare pop is. Unless they've said something (I haven't looked), for what we know the minimum they need is to be able to rent a 1U slot for a server in a suitably well connected data centre for smaller locations.

I've worked at places where "setting up a POP" meant exactly that, and I've worked at places that insisted on setting up $2 million monstrosities in custom built racks no matter how small the local market was. Unsurprisingly, the latter company went bankrupt.

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