By Repatriado
HAVANA TIMES – Cuba’s state-controlled telecommunications monopoly, Etecsa, asked for people to comment about their third mobile Internet trial, which involved free surfing using a 100Mb data package which was to be used in 72 hours.
I wanted to find out what people’s general opinion was, so I read many of the 1048 comments that had been published up until 18:00 on Etecsa’s website on September 11th. I was going to count how many negative comments there were, but to my surprise, negative comments were the overwhelming majority so I chose to count the positive ones instead. When I had already picked out 30 “positive” comments, I read them again because I hadn’t really defined what counted as positive.
I realized that I was accepting comments from people who still remained optimistic about this service after the trial, I’ll give you some examples:
The filter I was using was too relaxed I thought, so I focused on hunting out those comments that really did express satisfaction or success. I must say that it was difficult to find them, after scouring through the over thousand comments published, I only found three that were truly positive:
Taking out the few technical comments on the website, the nearly 1000 remaining comments were like the following:
In the face of such a huge disaster, I got in touch with a friend who has been working at the company’s headquarters for over 15 years to find out what had happened.
She tells me that the infrastructure they are using is still far from satisfying demand, that even so, there is still an order “from above” that they provide this service because Etecsa is one of the few profitable companies that rakes in huge amounts of foreign currency with its international top-up services, something which they hope will increase with the new service.
In addition to poor infrastructure, she says that delays in implementing this service are a result of the decapitalization that this company is experiencing, whose profits go directly into the Government’s coffers and towards censoring dissident websites.
Even though she didn’t know how much this service will cost, I have no doubt that it will be one of the most expensive Internet services in the world, as the Cuban government uses the price as its best control over Internet content.
"Does anyone know how many people in Cuba actually produce value, and how many idlers…
We face discrimination; no one wants to hear what's wrong; everyone wants to hear what's…
Jose Mulino replaced former President Ricardo Martinelli, who has asylum in the Nicaraguan Embassy after…
In order to improve navigation and features, Havana Times uses cookies.