ETECSA begins tests on the submarine cable that connects Cuba with Martinique

The state Telecommunications Company (Etecsa) began a trial period of the submarine cable that connects Cuba with Martinique and assures that the internet speed on the island has already increased.

The official newspaper Cubadebate pointed out that the evaluation of the new cable called Arimao It began in April with the operation of a new station, and currently manages an initial level of traffic growth for the corresponding adjustments.

Lidia Esther Hidalgo Rodríguez, vice president of Network Operations, explained that such adjustments are added to the optimization and growth tasks that have been undertaken in the other layers of the network, and have allowed "during this month to increase total traffic in 17%, with the mobile service representing 83% of this value," he added.

He said that Internet users in Cuba – a country with the worst internet speed in Latin America – have already perceived an increase in transfer speed during off-peak hours, but still work was done on replacement with new equipment with greater processing capacities in order to increase the number of clients connected to the mobile network at the same time.

He added that during these months they have also been carrying out maintenance work to reduce problems with Internet browsing, and as a result of this action more than one million new user sessions were generated.

In this regard, he said that in Cuba "each user who connects generates more than one session, since there are applications that run in the background and request simultaneous connections" and that the Cuban network has an average of 1.6 sessions per user.

It was necessary to optimize processes such as traffic management, and add processing cards for the management of these new sessions, explained Hidalgo Rodríguez.

"Certainly, capacities were exhausted in the last period with the exponential increase in mobile data services, without possibilities of expansion in the existing equipment, so it was necessary to integrate and put into operation new equipment with better features, which would eliminate definitively the restriction due to lack of capacity," he argued.

"We have not yet reached the transfer speed values expected by our clients, and that is the response to the actions that continue in process, both in the addition of new international capacities, as well as the growth of new elements in other fundamental points of the network, to manage more users and improve the experience of using the service," he explained.

He said that "users had many problems navigating and had to put on airplane mode repeatedly. Low speeds, even in 4G, continue to affect the quality of service."

In December 2022 ETECSA and the French company Orange S.A. work began to install the cable submarine to bring internet to Cuba from the island of Martinique.

With this project, the regime proposed diversify your international connectivity, since until now the only route of this type is the ALBA 1 system, by agreement between Cuba and Venezuela.

In January, the island's authorities said they were working "accelerated" to put into operation the international submarine fiber optic cable of the French multinational Orange, the company that connected the cable with Martinique.

In September of last year, the Worldwide Broadband Speed League 2022 report revealed that Cuba occupies last place in internet speed in Latin America and the Caribbean with 3.26 megabits per second (Mbps) of broadband transmission.

Based on the analysis of more than 1.1 billion broadband speed tests in 220 countries, Cuba ranked 203rd below Venezuela at 187th (with a speed of 4.47 Mbps).