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The Cuban CDN

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Re: The Cuban CDN

#81

Post by fiatjaf »

dandelany wrote: post #50
Nutomic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#82

Post by skybrian »

Alupis wrote: post #78
skybrian wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You pay a CDN to get better performance (globally) than you would get by default. It's up to the provider to decide what "better performance" means and build more infrastructure to support that.

As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick about how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved (which new endpoints to open). You pay your money and they decide which countries to spend it on.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#83

Post by krallja »

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.

T-1, now with an overall rate of 1.544 million bits per second!

Re: The Cuban CDN

#84

Post by christoph »

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

It's been so long since I even heard anyone mention T-1, I had to look up the speed, 1.54 mbps. I remember in the early days of dialup internet access with 14.4k when this was seen as a very highly coveted connection to have access to.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#85

Post by zappo2938 »

greenshackle wrote: post #70
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/

Along the same thought is RFC 2549 and RFC 1149 for IPv6, IP over Avian Carriers.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

Re: The Cuban CDN

#86

Post by walrus01 »

chillydawg wrote: post #47
CompuHacker wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cubans would benefit from infrastructure in Cuba.

But cloudflare would not.

Sure they would, given a significant percentage of cubans that might have internet access at home or on their phones in the future, US-based spanish language media/websites are good potential paying customers for cloudflare.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#87

Post by Alupis »

skybrian wrote: post #82
Alupis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You pay a CDN to get better performance (globally) than you would get by default. It's up to the provider to decide what "better performance" means and build more infrastructure to support that. As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick about how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved (which new endpoints to open). You pay your money and they decide which countries…

> As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick about how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved

This was a public discussion, and therefore I have every right to "chime in".

As a paying customer, I have even more of a right to "chime in", as Cloudflare decisions may impact my business.

Putting a PoP in Cuba because "bleeding hearts from decades of terrible government policy" isn't a sound business decision. Nobody has offered any better explanation of advantages other than the novelty, and frankly, if that's the core reason... that's a bad decision and a blatant waste of money.

Re: The Cuban CDN

#89

Post by jlgaddis »

barkingcat wrote: post #35
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…

Sounds like a warez share - there's a curation group, and a large ftp server (with lots of people having upload credentials) You give people a credit for uploading something (anything recent, has to not exist currently on the share), in order to get access to download anything from the ftp. People want to get free stuff, so they contribute some small thing - like an antivirus update that you can download for free fro…

Granted, I've been out of the "warez scene" for going on 20 years but the "better clubs" didn't have ratios. For the "public" or your average person that was turned on to a site by their buddy or something, yeah. But once you were really "in", you didn't have to do anything. You just took what you wanted -- even better if you can turn around and upload it elsewhere.

I started out running BBS systems but, like everyone, eventually moved to the Internet where I ran several "semi-private" dedicated servers with lots of storage on "fast" (at the time) connections. Most of them were fully open to those in certain groups but there were a couple that were pretty easy to get an account on, albeit with a ratio requirement. A lot of those accounts tended to get banned pretty quickly, however, as the users would upload miscellaneous crap just so that they could download and nobody wanted to really "monitor" or "evaluate" the stuff in /incoming from the new users.

Thanks for taking me back to my younger days. :)

Re: The Cuban CDN

#90

Post by lerpa »

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.

Make everyone a criminal so you have an excuse to get rid of those you don't like.
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