NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #20/NN_1992_20.iso/spool/comp/dcom/telecom/10151

Internet Message Format | 1992-09-08 | 10.6 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!news.acns.nwu.edu!telecom-request
Date: Sat, 5 Sep 92 16:26 GMT
From: George S Thurman <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Latest Cuba -- US Telephone Situation
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 12, Issue 686, Message 2 of 6
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Here is an article from the FIDONET SHORTWAVE ECHO that I thought
TELECOM Digest readers would find of interest ...


 Msg#:14519 *SHORTWAVE*
 09-02-92 21:55:00
 From: DON KIMBERLIN
  To: ALL
 Subj: TECHIE REALPOLITIK


It appears that AT&T has gotten itself into a bit of a bind about
connectivity between the U.S. and Cuba, in a fall from one of the
world's catbird seats into one of its stickier wickets.

Within a week's time, Hurricane Andrew helped the whole matter turn
around.

Back in pre-Castro Cuba, AT&T and ITT had enjoyed a 50/50 split of
ownership of the Cuban-American Telephone Company.  Right up through
the Batista dictatorship, that deal had made Cuba a willing market for
AT&T's Western Electric-made hardware and a willing correspondent for
the international services sold by AT&T and ITT's various telephone
and telegraph entities.

By 1959, the telecommunications bonds between Cuba and the U.S. had
grown through several generations of shortwave radio and a couple of
generations of submarine cable (from Key West reaching 78 miles
underwater to Havana, providing all of 12 voice channels and
supplemented by a Western Union telegraph cable of similar length), to
the point that vastly expanded telephone communications were
reasonable to provide.

In 1959, AT&T and Cuban-American opened up what was at the time, one
of the world's great advances in public dial telephone service -- a
900 Mhz tropospheric scatter over-the-horizon radio system capable of
bearing 960 dial telephone channels...or one video signal. (A similar,
smaller tropo scatter to Nassau, Bahamas also was built operating in
the 2 gHz region.)

Now, both the Bahamas and Cuba had instant, direct-dialed
communications in copious quantity via the U.S. to the world.  Via the
U.S. radio terminals at Florida City, FL just two microwave hops south
of Miami along the route to Key West.  And, both correspondents made
good use of their broadband links to the outside world.  It was indeed
a breakthrough in international communications for 1959.  Florida
City's drive-in movie-like parabolic sections were a showplace on AT&t
publications and in AT&T executive tours.

But, when Fidel Castro toppled the Batista dictatorship in Cuba very
shortly thereafter, the troposcatter between Florida City and Guanabo
(outside Havana), the troposcatter link to the U.S. became both a
prize and a symbolic political thorn for both countries.

First off, AT&T and the U.S. had to keep the link up, and in doing so,
it provided a handly way for Castro and his government to dial Rome,
Paris, Madrid, London -- and even Moscow -- while the hated Americans
had to handle the calls, and wonder when they would get paid for them.
At the same time, incoming calls from the U.S. made it easy for
expatriate Cuban refugees to just dial up relatives and even
counter-revolutionaries from their new homes and offices in the U.S.
Florida City operated that way for more than 30 years, and its traffic
volumes were huge.

It was, in fact, so popular that by 1966, AT&T had to do something
about the gigantic unpaid settlements for years of calls made out of
Cuba to the whole world -- on AT&T's tab with all the world's other
communications entities.  The balance owing AT&T was enormous, and
Castro had no intention of paying.  Obviously, his huge unpaid balance
was simply an item he felt was tit for tat.  It's easy to see how
Castro (and certainly his Russian masters) must have enjoyed the dual
economic "get-back" and embarrassment Florida City was causing the
hated U.S. during the deeper years of the Cold War.

Finally, after years of no successful moves toward settling the
balance, AT&T did something Castro probably never thought they would
do.  AT&T set up a plan and got approval from the government in
Washington to shut down the system ... until Castro would come to
terms.

It was only necessary to to so for a few hours. Obviously, Castro
needed it badly, and all within one day, Florida City was shut down
and restarted after Castro's government agreed that all future calls
had to be paid for from the U.S. end; that is, pre-paid on all calls
to Cuba, and collect on all calls out of Cuba, with the proceeds being
applied to settling Castro's debt to AT&T.  It would seem the hated
Yankees had won, and Florida City operated that way clear up to
Hurricane Andrew.

Things got old and creaky, and circuits got noisy, but continued to
function enough for people to shout on and communicate.  Very early
on, the Cubans shut down one of their two transmitters to save power
and parts, so the link had no diversity, which would show in Florida's
frequently foggy weather.  But, the traffic volumes remained high, and
AT&T must have felt secure.

AT&T may have felt a bit too secure, however, when in 1990 the Cuban
government advertised to the world for someone to provide another
international outlet for Cuba.  AT&T's response was to go ahead and
lay a used fiber optic cable from West Palm Beach down to Cuban
territorial waters and give the Cubans an "opportunity" to let it be
completed to replace the Florida City link.

But AT&T's skills in international competition really are still
neonatal, and they didn't count on any meaningful competition.  The
result was that Castro's government accepted a contract with
ItalCable, Italy's equivalent of AT&T's international division, and
ItalCable built a large satellite earth station linking Cuba to the
world via Rome -- with full world-reaching DDD.  Castro no longer
needed the Florida City link; something AT&T hadn't counted on.
However, by 1990, the "war" between Cuba and Washington had mellowed
to one that permitted Castro to tolerate its existence -- so long as
it didn't become a bother.  AT&T was merely the backup route now, and
Castro had no need for AT&T's "opportunity" which lay dormant under
the tropical ocean.

But, Florida City was becoming another sort of bother for AT&T, which
felt differently, and didn't properly realize it was no longer in
controi of Cuba's international communications destiny.  Florida City
was sitting there occupying frequencies that BellSouth now needed for
its new cellular telephone service.  AT&T was in Washington, regrett-
ing it simply could not shut down one of the U.S.'s links to a foreign
country.

(All along, once the Italian route was opened, AT&T could have set up
an operating agreement to transit calls with Cuba via Rome, but pride
can and does keep politicians and corporations from swallowing bitter
pills without help.  So, even though alternate routes to Havana were
available, AT&T never set up agreements for third-country routes to
Cuba.)

Enter Hurricane Andrew on the scene.  Andrew toppled AT&T's microwave
tower at Goulds, FL, between Miami and Florida City, shutting down
microwave connectivity to both the Florida City tropo station and the
Florida Keys, a route that has to follow a narrow path of semi-dry
land and stepping-stones of islands down to Key West ... there's just
no alternate physical pathway down the Keys, so everything --
electricity, water, telephones -- all run along the narrow roadway and
under the bridges of U.S. 1 leading to Key West.  AT&T lost its
connectivity to Cuba.

The world's telephone network operates internally with far less
control than most outsiders would know.  That lack of control provides
convenience for excess traffic to momentarily "overflow" to other
routes via third nations, and the CCITT standards even allow for
occasional spills of such traffic, requiring each nation to handle
occasional and casual calls for the other partners.  It's also a
weakness that lets phreaks do their thing once they can get into the
innards of their own nation's dial network, because a few calls
transiting each nation are permitted without question.  But, when a
regular liaison is to be set up between two nations, any "transit"
nation is supposed to be paid its share for handling the calls.  A
"transit operating agreement" has to be set up.  So long as Florida
City functioned, AT&T did not have to face the truth of its loss as
the world's prime route to Cuba.  And, the volume of calls between
Cubans on both sides of the political fence made it convenient.

But, Andrew's stoppage of Florida City caused a problem that didn't
reach the nightly national news.  Thousands and thousands of Cubans
still dialed for Havana daily.  AT&T had a particular problem in its
network with those thousands of calls routed to Florida with no place
to go. The traffic spilled out to alternate routes that normally
serviced Madrid, Paris, Rome and other European capitals -- all of
which now focused on Rome as the main route to Cuba.  Congestion
occurred between European cities as the large influx originating in
the U.S. and Canada went across the Atlantic.

By Tuesday, September 1, the Europeans were complaining and
threatening to limit U.S. calls from AT&T into their networks.  AT&T
had no "operating agreements" for them to handle transit traffic to
Rome and Cuba.  (No small part of the problem is a consistent one that
occurs in international transits.  Everbody on the route wants a 50%
share.  That loses money on the first transit, but when a call has to
spill out such that four places are involved, it's downright
expensive, something nobody wants a piece of.

So, by Tuesday:

   a.) Hurricane Andrew's impact had been felt in the European
telephone network, and Europeans were threatening to choke back AT&T
traffic into their nets;

   b.) Competitors like MCI and Sprint were chortling a bit as their
traffic went into Europe unimpeded, since they handled no calls to
Havana, instead dumping their loads at AT&T;

   c.) Stepchild BellSouth was hoping AT&T would give up on Florida
City, so they could open up some cellular channels in that area, and

   d.) AT&T was trying to find a way, without talking directly, to get
Castro to accept use of the fiber cable lying fallow under the ocean.

Now that you know, as Paul Harvey puts it, "The Rest of the Story," I
hope you'll enjoy understanding more fully what bits of news you do
hear about AT&T's loss to Hurricane Andrew at Florida City.  It's
bound to become a political debacle before it's over.


WM v2.04/92-0315
 * Origin: Borderline! BBS Kannapolis,N.C. [phone] (1:379/37)