Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!casbah.acns.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: 0004133373@mcimail.com (Donald E. Kimberlin) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: A History of the USA to Cuba Phone Links Message-ID: Date: 19 Feb 91 06:00:00 GMT Sender: news@casbah.acns.nwu.edu Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 94 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 137, Message 3 of 6 Originator: telecom@delta.eecs.nwu.edu In a reply to the original posting, Digest V11, iss129 has a reply from David Lesher that obviously indicates he has been in Havana to see some of the other end, something I was never able to do. He raises some points worthy of expansion: > 1) There IS something called "Western Union Havana" that runs circuits > to Key West, In the classic mode of "old" Telecommunications American- Style, there were separate "telephone" and "telegraph" companies in the Cuba that was under U.S. dominance. Western Union certainly was the "telegraph company" there in that era, as in many other places. However, what occurred and to what extent WUTCo was affected, I don't know. Moreso than AT&T or ITT, the joint owners of Cuban-American Telephone, WUTCo was likely to hire local nationals and have rather autonomous management, so it may have been so minimal as to simply take over the operation on paper. The office Lesher saw with its four channels only was certainly the one working to the US on the four channels of FDM that ultimately replaced the ancient mechanical TDM I referred to. In international cablegram operations, a partition of the international Telex network is used, with the different name of Gentex (numbers dialable only between Gentex machines so as not to get crossed with subscriber connections), so what looked like Telex could have been Gentex machines. > 2) The voice quality of the existing system is likely to be the worst > you have ever experienced. The crosstalk is equal to your desired > source -- on a good day. That certainly could be the state of that analog tropo, which if properly aligned and coordinated, would produce crystal-clear channels ... but there's no telling what sort of foul state it has fallen to with thirty years of no effective maintenance operations now. > 3) The Soviot Chancery has several four-metre {+/-3db ;-} dishes that > I assume talk to one of their birds. No doubt the Soviets have their own direct stuff to Moscow, and were one to get to the right part of the countryside, there's probably a proper international-class Molnya earth station for the public phone network. > 4) According to newspaper accounts, there is now fiber-optic cable in > place with boocoo capacity. {Who installed it?} The hangup in using it > involves transferring money to Cuba to maintain their end of the link. > Treasury does not want to break the boycott to that extent. That's a confusing story, because U.S. press has reported that AT&T got a recovered piece of "an old transatlantic cable" laid to Cuba (presumably by a cableship of a third nation, as AT&T wouldn't be able to get permission, much less its gargantuan cableships into Cuban coastal waters), and there are no "old" fiber transoceanic cables yet. > But, Bell South was rumored to be putting the screws on to get it > running. Why? Apparently, the existing link [I assume this refers to > the Florida City tropo setup] uses spectrum space Bell South wants for > cellular service in an area they see as a real gold mine - the Keys. Yes, the Florida City tropo to Cuba runs in the region of 950 megaHertz -- right where cellular telephones were later assigned. However, it doesn't fill the whole band that BellSouth would have available, and its signal is a focused beam right off the Florida coast toward Havana, not down along the Keys. Methinks BellSouth is simply playing politics, perhaps with tacit encouragement from AT&T in its obvious interest to get off that tropo anyway. > Confusing that is the fact I think I just saw a recent Bell South ad > for new Keys cellular service. Have they gone ahead without the needed > spectrum space? In view of the preceding comments, BellSouth certainly could. They just wouldn't have the whole ranch they want available to them. (I guess you roamers would hear some curious noises on a few channels.) > 5) Once you get to Havana, you still need working local plant to reach > your destination. Let me put this in c.d.t. terms: John Higdon, I've > got just the place for all that Pac*Bell stuff -- it would be several > orders of magnitude better. No doubt about that. Seeing as all the local plant Cuba is likely to have is what was placed thirty to forty years ago, it's a tribute to their resourcefulness that they have anything working. I was surprised when I got the task of commissioning the Marti Airport-to-Miami FAA ringdown that Castro agreed to for stopping hijackers that the Cubans came up with really clean, clear local plant to get it out to the airport from the Gaunabo tropo station. (Oh, yes, we had to use the Florida City tropo at the time, as it was one of the years the Key West-Havana cable was inoperative ... and the tropo hadn't gotten all that bad yet.)