AOL News | January 24, 2011 | Lauren Frayer
One of the world’s most unplugged countries is about to get high-speed Internet, courtesy of an old friend.
A specialized ship began laying fiber-optic cable under the Caribbean Sea from Venezuela toward Cuba this past weekend, launching a $70 million project to connect the communist island nation with better phone and Internet service. Internet access in Cuba currently has to go through satellites to get around U.S. embargo restrictions, which ends up being costly and slow.
The new fiber-optic cable is being laid by a French-flagged ship from the company Alcatel-Lucent, and paid for jointly by the Venezuelan and Cuban state telecommunications companies. The cable is expected to stretch 1,000 miles underwater and hook up to Cuba next month, with computers going online there — at a connection speed 3,000 times faster than before — sometime this summer.
In addition, a 150-mile extension of the cable will eventually connect Cuba to nearby Jamaica, the Havana Times reported.
Officials from Cuba and its most prominent ally, Venezuela, touted the fiber-optic project as a slap in the face to America’s embargo on Cuba, which has largely kept the tiny communist island out of the broadband era, prohibiting any U.S. tech companies from doing business in Cuba.
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