Carriers that want to penetrate the relatively untapped Cuban telecom market will have to wait a little bit longer as an submarine cable network linking Venezuela to Cuba won`t go into operation until possibly July 2011.
While not revealing where they are at in the network construction process Alberto Rodriguez, Cuba`s vice minister of information and communications, said in Cuban Communist Party-backed newspaper Granma that the new cable would take ten months to build the 5,000 km cable.
Supplying equipment to the project, which is designed to reduce Cuba`s reliance on satellites and cut down telephony and Internet service costs, is Alcatel-Lucent.
The building of this cable comes after the U.S. government said last April that it would allow service providers to build out optical cable and satellite facilities that would link the U.S. and Cuba, allow roaming service agreements with Cuban wireless operators, and allow U.S. service providers to enhance the service they provide in the Cuban telecom market.
