What Became of the Arcos Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba? (2020)
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Re: What Became of the Arcos Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba? (2020)
#2Posting this because there were many reports of Internet disruptions in Cuba and HN likes stuff about underwater cables.
What many may not know is that there's one major high speed link to the world through ALBA-1. This article is about the ARCOS-1 cable network in the Carribean. An extension was supposed to be added to Cuba but mysteriously was dropped around the last US presidential election. As far as I can tell this is the only recentish article about the application being withdrawn.
I'm not looking to fuel partisan strife, I genuinely want to shine light on this and hope some of the HN community might know more of the story.
Re: What Became of the Arcos Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba? (2020)
#3Highly curious about this, anyone have a good explanation?
Re: What Became of the Arcos Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba? (2020)
#4Edit 3: I originally referenced https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/brazil-us/arcos... which claimed the following:
> The application for license for the ARCOS-1 Cuba Extension is still pending for approval.
However, though this page is a good resource about the cable itself, this quote appears not to be correct. See below for the edit history containing what I think is the most likely current publicly known state of the project:
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Edit: a quick google for "arcos-1" "cuba" site:.gov yielded the following which may be relevant. I'm still parsing.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-368065A1.pdf
Edit 2: from above,
> By letter filed October 26, 2020, ARCOS-1 USA, Inc. and A.SurNet, Inc. (together, Applicants) notified the Commission of the withdrawal of the request to modify the license for the ARCOS-1 submarine cable system - SCL-LIC-19981222-00032, SCL-MOD-20010302-00007, and SCL-MOD-20020701-00056 - to include a new landing point in Cuba.
So uh... dead in the water unless anyone finds anything more recent. That quote is more recent than the linked article.
Re: What Became of the Arcos Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba? (2020)
#5title should have (2020)
Re: What Became of the Arcos Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba? (2020)
#6[dead]
Re: What Became of the Arcos Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba? (2020)
#7I am not really sure of the agenda behind this post, but just a reminder that there is a submarine cable (ALBA-1) that connects Cuba and Venezuela and serves as a full time link and connects Cuba to the world and gives them FREE INTERNET through Venezuelan biggest ISP (Cantv).
This free internet makes Venezuelans furious as our corrupt, dictatorship government rather give CUBA a big part of our own international connectivity that actually use that for our own connectivity/broadband. Note that we have one of the slowest internet connections in the world [1], this last 24 months, we have improved a lot (from rank 200+ to 139) due to some private ISPs finally allowed to purchase a bit more of bandwidth, but it’s still hoarded by our national ISP (gov controlled) and Cuba itself, there has been reports of the CUBA's power going as far as actually having managing positions on venezuelan national's ISP and helping Venezuela's gov on censuring our internet. [2] [3]
I don’t want to get political here, but in before you start criticizing sanctions/blockade and come with sob stories, lets talk about what Cuba really is, a 60 years old dictatorship where human rights are violated everyday making every citizen life a living hell.
tldr; Cuba gov controls all internet access to the island, and they get internet from Venezuela for free no matter what USA does, so they aren't really disconnected from the world because of sanctions/blockade.
[1] https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/venezuela#fixed
[2] https://www.cubanet.org/tecnologia-2/asi-funciona-la-censura...
[3] https://venezuelaaldia.com/2019/05/21/cantv-cubatel-costo-us...
Re: What Became of the Arcos Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba? (2020)
#8Why isn't Cuba the country organising their own cable connection? There are plenty of nearish places to connect to if the US doesn't want to be involved.
Re: What Became of the Arcos Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba? (2020)
#9Why isn't Cuba the country organising their own cable connection? There are plenty of nearish places to connect to if the US doesn't want to be involved.
They do interconnect to Venezuela and Jamaica via ALBA-1.
The answer to your question in general, though, is that it is very hard to do business with Cuba when a superpower disapproves of it.
Re: What Became of the Arcos Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba? (2020)
#10I am not really sure of the agenda behind this post, but just a reminder that there is a submarine cable (ALBA-1) that connects Cuba and Venezuela and serves as a full time link and connects Cuba to the world and gives them FREE INTERNET through Venezuelan biggest ISP (Cantv). This free internet makes Venezuelans furious as our corrupt, dictatorship government rather give CUBA a big part of our own international conn…
The Cuban government and intelligentsia are connected, but ordinary people are not. Until 2018, the only way for most Cubans to get online was via public wifi spots, and while there is now some 3G data connectivity, the pricing remains prohibitive: at last check 1 GB is about a week's salary.