8 ms·

In fact, it's quite probable. Doubt it'll happen in 2016, but bet it will by the end of 2017.

Zenfinch 10y ago
It will be fascinating to see how fast Cuba in a post embargo-lift landscape can build up ip infrastructure, its cool that by year's end 2017 its probably good enough for a Cloudflare PoP. (though imagine being uniquely placed to the USA along with other factors is a huge plus for building that infra).
- darkr 10y ago
  AFAIK among the many sanctions imposed on Cuba by the US, none of them involved free and open Internet connectivity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba
Alupis 10y ago
> we'll have a PoP in Cuba Why though? Cloudflare doesn't have POP's in most countries, and Cuba isn't somehow very advantageous compared to having a POP in Puerto Rico, Florida, Mexico, or any of the more connected Caribbean nations. Is it for the novelty, or am I missing some advantage of setting up infrastructure in Cuba... ?
- CompuHacker 10y ago
  Cubans would benefit from infrastructure in Cuba.
  - chillydawg 10y ago
    But cloudflare would not.
    - walrus01 10y ago
      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.
  - Alupis 10y ago
    Cubans would benefit from having access to the internet... Cloudflare doesn't provide any of that, nor is a PoP required in Cuba for Cubans to browse websites (even those running behind Cloudflare). Nor will Cubans benefit from a data center being built in Cuba, since majority of said data center's clients will be internationals (not businesses nor people in Cuba). It does seem like a Cloudflare PoP in Cuba is merely for the novelty.
    - Graphon1 10y ago
      It seems shortsighted to say "Cubans won't benefit" because international people will benefit first. If more international people go to Cuba, whether for tourism or to invest in businesses, or start businesses, isn't there a benefit to the Cuban people? And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone. In the US the benefits of the connected network initially reached only the US DoD and its partners. Then university communities. Then early tech companies. Then everyone.
      - Alupis 10y ago
        > And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone Yes, but as a paying Cloudflare customer, I'd much rather Cloudflare spend their/my money tangibly improving their service, not propping up a small nation's economy in some sort of idealistic hope that better things will follow. From my understanding, and from the article's description, most Cubans simply don't have easy access to the internet, or in some cases, no access at all. So putting in data centers which will primarily service foreign corporations seems very imperialistic as well as opportunistic (cheap land, cheap labor, etc). They need last-mile carriers more than anything, and even though ISP's generally terminate at a data center, there's a whole lot that must happen first before Cubans will feel any benefits. So, Cloudflare adding a PoP in Cuba by 2017 seems to have zero benefits, for anyone really. Even after Cloudflare does setup a PoP, the benefits to Cubans are minimal-to-none. Perhaps if Cloudflare is simply itching to burn extra money, they could instead consider lowering the price of their business tier - making it immediately more accessible for more companies. This brings SSL to more sites, protects them from attacks, and can in some cases dramatically improve performance. Those a tangible benefits for the entire internet.
- rdl 10y ago
  It will speed Internet access for Cuban users (regular people, government, visitors, etc.). As local access gets liberalized (which seems inevitable), the international links will be contended -- Cuba isn't rich, and there isn't a huge amount of lit connectivity in place between Cuba and Miami yet. Seems safe to assume that most Cuban users will be accessing US or EU websites. Caching in Cuba, especially for large media content, will make the same amount of international bandwidth cover more users. (The latency between Havana and Miami isn't much, true.) At some point, assuming more liberalization, there will be more Cuban websites; if those sites use a cache like CloudFlare it will be faster for international visitors, including expat Cubans. It's at worst a no-op for Cubans, but probably provides some benefit, increasing over time. If a private company is going to pay for it, I don't see what's wrong with it. (There's already a Miami POP; I'm not sure what Cuban routing is like but I suspect they have a lot of non-US terminating transit for political reasons, which will probably change with time...) As to why CloudFlare would want to do it: I'm sure there's a novelty/marketing aspect to it. It's also a feel-good thing for employees and the world -- the Cuban situation has been sad, even if you agree with the embargo policy, and doing something to improve the lives of Cubans is awesome. Plus, Cuba is (hopefully) going to rapidly rejoin the world economy, so it will make increasing commercial sense. But you'd have to ask eastdakota/jgrahamc why they want to do it.
  - Alupis 10y ago
    > It will speed Internet access for Cuban users Cloudflare being in Cuba or not will have zero impact on this... unless Cloudflare is getting into the last-mile business (doubtful, but possible). > As local access gets liberalized (which seems inevitable) Inevitable, probably, but in 1 year's time - unlikely. > Caching in Cuba, especially for large media content, will make the same amount of international bandwidth cover more users This could be the only tangible benefit - except Cloudfare isn't a "nation level" cache, they're a glorified CDN with only some content being "opted-in" to using Cloudflare. So the actual benefit will be minimal (unless Cloudlfare decides to cache all inbound content for the entire nation... which seems unlikely). > there will be more Cuban websites; if those sites use a cache like CloudFlare it will be faster for international visitors Cloudflare doesn't need to be in Cuba for this to happen. Frankly, Cloudflare needs to _not_ be in Cuba for this to happen, otherwise it would be no different than a regular hosted server in Cuba (for in-country traffic that is). > Plus, Cuba is (hopefully) going to rapidly rejoin the world economy, Cuba never left the world economy -- only the American economy. Cloudflare isn't an ISP, so Cloudflare putting a PoP in Cuba literally provides zero benefits to Cuba (and it's heavily questionable whether it would provide any benefits to Cloudflare either). Sure, some money will be exchanged, but it's very likely the data center Cloudflare would colo at would be foreign owned and operated (since Cuba obviously lacks this infrastructure and expertise to build such an infrastructure, let alone maintain one). > As to why CloudFlare would want to do it: I'm sure there's a novelty/marketing aspect to it That seems to be the only logical conclusion. Look, I'm a paying customer and love Cloudflare's service. It made a huge difference for my company's website. But it seems the comment that started this wasn't thoroughly thought through.
- vidarh 10y ago
  > Why though? Cuba has 1/4 of the population of the Caribbean in one relatively small location. Look at their network map [1] and you see they already cover major locations in South America, and has good coverage of the US, but Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean is a blan spot. Looking at their worldwide location, my guess is that they pick their POPs largely based on whether they see a potential for cutting latency for their customers based on a mix of population size and the local transit situation. In the US, it's relatively sparse. Probably because you don't gain much by increasing the number, as you can solve most latency issues within the US by buying more expensive transit from established backbone providers or peering directly with major ISPs at a relatively low number of peering points. So lots of POPs == either high population or shitty latency over the regular network coupled with poor peering opportunities or other ways of cutting latency without putting actual servers in a rack. Or both. Cuba is interesting - as someone has pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the plane traffic between the US and Cuba is quite substantial despite the travel limitations, because of the large Cuban exile community. If Cuba liberalises network connections, chances are that despite the small current number of Cuban internet users, it would explode quickly, and that there would be a lot of US based businesses that might look to Cloudflare if Cloudflare could cut their latency. Given the size of the Cuban population, it wouldn't take a large proportion of the population to make it the best contender for a first POP in the Caribbean. My guess is that Cloudflare is looking to add a lot more POPs over the next few years anyway (EDIT: Supported by finding an announced from when they set up a POP in Kuala Lumpur: In September 2015 that was their 45th POP; today their map shows 83; if they add POPs at the same rate or faster until 2017, they'll be past running out of locations more suitable than a liberalised Cuba), and if you look at the empty spots on the map, and mark those areas with high population density and poor peering situation, I'd not at all be surprised if Cuba start looking quite good in the "if just they fix these couple of issues" (from the point of view of putting a POP in - I'm not trying to trivialise their problems) category. [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map/ https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map/
  - eastdakota 10y ago
    Yup. Plus: Venezuela.
walrus01 10y ago
One of the major things we should watch for is a Miami to Cuba submarine cable. The Miami area (and the Terremark/Verizon "NAP of the Americas" IX point/datacenter) is already the landing station for a ton of submarine cables going to latin america. At present there are challenges at OSI layer 1 getting data into/out of Cuba, not including any government regulation/interference, just due to the lack of pipes. There's a fiber cable to Venezuela, but VZ is not very well connected internationally and there's significant challenges with any US company trying to acquire a circuit on that path (do you want to build a POP in Caracas, with what's going on there right now?)
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  I did networking in another life, and I'd love to take some vacation time from my current gig to finagle networking in Cuba or Caracas. Dangerous? Of course. Where would the fun be if it wasn't.
  - eastdakota 10y ago
    https://www.cloudflare.com/join-our-team/ https://www.cloudflare.com/join-our-team/
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Wow, appreciate it.

It will be fascinating to see how fast Cuba in a post embargo-lift landscape can build up ip infrastructure, its cool that by year's end 2017 its probably good enough for a Cloudflare PoP. (though imagine being uniquely placed to the USA along with other factors is a huge plus for building that infra).

darkr 10y ago
AFAIK among the many sanctions imposed on Cuba by the US, none of them involved free and open Internet connectivity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Cuba

Alupis 10y ago

> we'll have a PoP in Cuba Why though? Cloudflare doesn't have POP's in most countries, and Cuba isn't somehow very advantageous compared to having a POP in Puerto Rico, Florida, Mexico, or any of the more connected Caribbean nations. Is it for the novelty, or am I missing some advantage of setting up infrastructure in Cuba... ?

CompuHacker 10y ago
Cubans would benefit from infrastructure in Cuba.
- chillydawg 10y ago
  But cloudflare would not.
  - walrus01 10y ago
    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.
- Alupis 10y ago
  Cubans would benefit from having access to the internet... Cloudflare doesn't provide any of that, nor is a PoP required in Cuba for Cubans to browse websites (even those running behind Cloudflare). Nor will Cubans benefit from a data center being built in Cuba, since majority of said data center's clients will be internationals (not businesses nor people in Cuba). It does seem like a Cloudflare PoP in Cuba is merely for the novelty.
  - Graphon1 10y ago
    It seems shortsighted to say "Cubans won't benefit" because international people will benefit first. If more international people go to Cuba, whether for tourism or to invest in businesses, or start businesses, isn't there a benefit to the Cuban people? And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone. In the US the benefits of the connected network initially reached only the US DoD and its partners. Then university communities. Then early tech companies. Then everyone.
    - Alupis 10y ago
      > And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone Yes, but as a paying Cloudflare customer, I'd much rather Cloudflare spend their/my money tangibly improving their service, not propping up a small nation's economy in some sort of idealistic hope that better things will follow. From my understanding, and from the article's description, most Cubans simply don't have easy access to the internet, or in some cases, no access at all. So putting in data centers which will primarily service foreign corporations seems very imperialistic as well as opportunistic (cheap land, cheap labor, etc). They need last-mile carriers more than anything, and even though ISP's generally terminate at a data center, there's a whole lot that must happen first before Cubans will feel any benefits. So, Cloudflare adding a PoP in Cuba by 2017 seems to have zero benefits, for anyone really. Even after Cloudflare does setup a PoP, the benefits to Cubans are minimal-to-none. Perhaps if Cloudflare is simply itching to burn extra money, they could instead consider lowering the price of their business tier - making it immediately more accessible for more companies. This brings SSL to more sites, protects them from attacks, and can in some cases dramatically improve performance. Those a tangible benefits for the entire internet.
rdl 10y ago
It will speed Internet access for Cuban users (regular people, government, visitors, etc.). As local access gets liberalized (which seems inevitable), the international links will be contended -- Cuba isn't rich, and there isn't a huge amount of lit connectivity in place between Cuba and Miami yet. Seems safe to assume that most Cuban users will be accessing US or EU websites. Caching in Cuba, especially for large media content, will make the same amount of international bandwidth cover more users. (The latency between Havana and Miami isn't much, true.) At some point, assuming more liberalization, there will be more Cuban websites; if those sites use a cache like CloudFlare it will be faster for international visitors, including expat Cubans. It's at worst a no-op for Cubans, but probably provides some benefit, increasing over time. If a private company is going to pay for it, I don't see what's wrong with it. (There's already a Miami POP; I'm not sure what Cuban routing is like but I suspect they have a lot of non-US terminating transit for political reasons, which will probably change with time...) As to why CloudFlare would want to do it: I'm sure there's a novelty/marketing aspect to it. It's also a feel-good thing for employees and the world -- the Cuban situation has been sad, even if you agree with the embargo policy, and doing something to improve the lives of Cubans is awesome. Plus, Cuba is (hopefully) going to rapidly rejoin the world economy, so it will make increasing commercial sense. But you'd have to ask eastdakota/jgrahamc why they want to do it.
- Alupis 10y ago
  > It will speed Internet access for Cuban users Cloudflare being in Cuba or not will have zero impact on this... unless Cloudflare is getting into the last-mile business (doubtful, but possible). > As local access gets liberalized (which seems inevitable) Inevitable, probably, but in 1 year's time - unlikely. > Caching in Cuba, especially for large media content, will make the same amount of international bandwidth cover more users This could be the only tangible benefit - except Cloudfare isn't a "nation level" cache, they're a glorified CDN with only some content being "opted-in" to using Cloudflare. So the actual benefit will be minimal (unless Cloudlfare decides to cache all inbound content for the entire nation... which seems unlikely). > there will be more Cuban websites; if those sites use a cache like CloudFlare it will be faster for international visitors Cloudflare doesn't need to be in Cuba for this to happen. Frankly, Cloudflare needs to _not_ be in Cuba for this to happen, otherwise it would be no different than a regular hosted server in Cuba (for in-country traffic that is). > Plus, Cuba is (hopefully) going to rapidly rejoin the world economy, Cuba never left the world economy -- only the American economy. Cloudflare isn't an ISP, so Cloudflare putting a PoP in Cuba literally provides zero benefits to Cuba (and it's heavily questionable whether it would provide any benefits to Cloudflare either). Sure, some money will be exchanged, but it's very likely the data center Cloudflare would colo at would be foreign owned and operated (since Cuba obviously lacks this infrastructure and expertise to build such an infrastructure, let alone maintain one). > As to why CloudFlare would want to do it: I'm sure there's a novelty/marketing aspect to it That seems to be the only logical conclusion. Look, I'm a paying customer and love Cloudflare's service. It made a huge difference for my company's website. But it seems the comment that started this wasn't thoroughly thought through.
vidarh 10y ago
> Why though? Cuba has 1/4 of the population of the Caribbean in one relatively small location. Look at their network map [1] and you see they already cover major locations in South America, and has good coverage of the US, but Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean is a blan spot. Looking at their worldwide location, my guess is that they pick their POPs largely based on whether they see a potential for cutting latency for their customers based on a mix of population size and the local transit situation. In the US, it's relatively sparse. Probably because you don't gain much by increasing the number, as you can solve most latency issues within the US by buying more expensive transit from established backbone providers or peering directly with major ISPs at a relatively low number of peering points. So lots of POPs == either high population or shitty latency over the regular network coupled with poor peering opportunities or other ways of cutting latency without putting actual servers in a rack. Or both. Cuba is interesting - as someone has pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the plane traffic between the US and Cuba is quite substantial despite the travel limitations, because of the large Cuban exile community. If Cuba liberalises network connections, chances are that despite the small current number of Cuban internet users, it would explode quickly, and that there would be a lot of US based businesses that might look to Cloudflare if Cloudflare could cut their latency. Given the size of the Cuban population, it wouldn't take a large proportion of the population to make it the best contender for a first POP in the Caribbean. My guess is that Cloudflare is looking to add a lot more POPs over the next few years anyway (EDIT: Supported by finding an announced from when they set up a POP in Kuala Lumpur: In September 2015 that was their 45th POP; today their map shows 83; if they add POPs at the same rate or faster until 2017, they'll be past running out of locations more suitable than a liberalised Cuba), and if you look at the empty spots on the map, and mark those areas with high population density and poor peering situation, I'd not at all be surprised if Cuba start looking quite good in the "if just they fix these couple of issues" (from the point of view of putting a POP in - I'm not trying to trivialise their problems) category. [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map/ https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map/
- eastdakota 10y ago
  Yup. Plus: Venezuela.

walrus01 10y ago

One of the major things we should watch for is a Miami to Cuba submarine cable. The Miami area (and the Terremark/Verizon "NAP of the Americas" IX point/datacenter) is already the landing station for a ton of submarine cables going to latin america. At present there are challenges at OSI layer 1 getting data into/out of Cuba, not including any government regulation/interference, just due to the lack of pipes. There's a fiber cable to Venezuela, but VZ is not very well connected internationally and there's significant challenges with any US company trying to acquire a circuit on that path (do you want to build a POP in Caracas, with what's going on there right now?)

toomuchtodo 10y ago
I did networking in another life, and I'd love to take some vacation time from my current gig to finagle networking in Cuba or Caracas. Dangerous? Of course. Where would the fun be if it wasn't.
- eastdakota 10y ago
  https://www.cloudflare.com/join-our-team/ https://www.cloudflare.com/join-our-team/
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Wow, appreciate it.