Cuba to Get 3,000 Times as Much Internet

Posted on Feb 15, 2011

The Official CTBTO Photostream (CC-BY)

Much of the world’s data travels across the seafloor through special cables. This particular cable is part of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s system for monitoring the oceans for nuclear detonation.

Thanks to a new undersea cable linking the island nation to Venezuela, Cuba will get a 3,000-fold boost in its information bandwidth. As Read Write Web’s Curt Hopkins points out, the project indicates how valuable the Internet is, even to a country that has serious blogging anxiety.

Read Write Web:

The Venezuela-Cuba joint project has been advertised as a triumph against the United States embargo of the island nation. Venezuela’s Gran Caribe and Cuba’s Transbit hired a Chinese subsidiary of the French company Alcatel-Lucent to lay the cable at a cost of $70 million. It took 19 days for the specialized cable-laying ship, Île de Batz to make the journey from Venezuela.

The project is an indication of how important the Internet is, even to countries whose relationship to communications is antagonistic. Currently, virtually no private Cuban citizens can secure an Internet connection. To blog, Cuba’s small blogger community must copy their posts onto a thumb-drive and sneak into a dollar-only hotel to post, or to email the post to compatriots outside the country.

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