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| visiondesdecuba.com |
HAVANA — On an island where most people have no Internet access, the
arrival of mobile phone email service was embraced with joy.
Tens of thousands of Cubans began emailing like crazy in March — for
days, until the service started to fail, taking much of Cuba’s already
shaky voice and text-messaging mobile service down with it
The
island’s aging cellphone towers became swamped by the new flood of email
traffic, creating havoc for anyone trying to use the system. Users had
to make eight or nine attempts to successfully send an email. Even voice
calls by non-subscribers’ began to drop mid-conversation. Callers
sounded like they were phoning from the bottom of the sea. Ordinary text
messages arrived days late, or not at all.
Since then, the state
telecom monopoly Etecsa has issued a rare apology and the troubles have
eased. But problems with the service, dubbed Nauta, offer a rare window
into the Internet in Cuba, where the digital age has been achingly slow
to spread since arriving in 1996, leaving the country virtually isolated
from the world of streaming video, photo-sharing and 4G cellphones.
Cuba’s
government blames the technological problems on a U.S. embargo that
prevents most American businesses from selling products to the Caribbean
country. Critics of the government say it deliberately strangles the
Internet to halt the spread of dissent. Other observers offer a less
political explanation: a government desperate for foreign exchange is
investing little in infrastructure improvements while extracting as much
revenue as possible from communications services largely paid for by
Cubans’ wealthier overseas relatives.
Experts say that last
explanation appears to be the primary culprit in the case of Nauta, in
which the government tried to open connections with the world but
floundered due to apparent poor planning and underinvestment.
“Cuba is extremely broke,” said Larry Press, a professor of information
systems and expert on Cuban telecommunications at California State
University, Dominguez Hills. “If they had access to tons of capital they
would probably expand (Internet service) further.”
About 100,000
people — around 5 percent of Cuban cellphone users — had subscribed to
the service even though it cost 50 times that of many U.S. data plans.
Radio
scriptwriter Lisandra Ayala, 36, stood in line for hours in March
outside an Etecsa office, dreaming of zipping emails back and forth with
her favorite cousin in Canada. Like many Cubans, she has long had a
smartphone — a status symbol frequently brought in by visiting
relatives.
She paid $1.50 to sign up for a Nauta contract that was
supposed to let her send emails with the ability to attach photos, but
not send video or check the Web. Even the price of $1 per megabyte, many
times higher than in virtually any developed country, didn’t deter her.
“I was so excited at first, but then the experience turned into a total
disaster,” Ayala said. After a week of decent service, she found it
impossible to open the icon for Nauta without trying at least six times;
voice calls dropped or didn’t go through and text messages disappeared
mid-air.
“We have been preparing for more than a year,” Hilda
Arias, director of Etecsa, told official media late last month.
“Customers’ expectations really exceeded our vision ... this provoked an
overload.”
She promised that the situation would improve, albeit slowly.
With
cellular rates as high as 35 cents a minute for domestic calls, Etecsa
earned roughly $500 million last year, revenue that’s been rising slowly
since 2008, according to Emilio Morales, a systems engineer who heads
the Miami-based Havana Consulting Group, a private consultant that
analyzes Cuba’s scanty public information about government revenues and
operations to produce estimates widely considered reliable by
Cuba-watchers.
“There are few businesses in Cuba that work as well as Etecsa,” he said.
The
group’s studies show that 54 percent of payments to Etecsa come
directly from the Cuban diaspora. Morales believes Cubans pay much of
the rest out of the estimated $2.6 billion a year in remittances from
abroad. And, while most state workers only make $20 a month, a new class
of roughly 400,000 independent businessmen and their employees also
make heavy use of cellphones for advertising with text-message as well
as ordinary business calls.
Authorities here say they are trying
to offer a range of new Internet services by year’s end, including
mobile Web access and unrestricted home Internet access, currently
limited to select government officials and employees of foreign
businesses and embassies.
But customers remain wary.
“Nauta
failed and stopped the whole mobile communication system from working
properly,” said Indira Perez, a 24-year-old university employee “If they
don’t prepare themselves better when they want to broaden Internet
access, it’s going to be total chaos.”
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