According to reports, the subterranean fiber-optic link which the island nation of Cuba has turned on through Venezuela apparently opens only the `inbound' high-speed connection of the Internet superhighway.

The telecommunications work pertaining to Cuba's new connection to the Internet had begun in 2007, with French firm Alcatel-Lucent laying the underwater fiber cable linking Cuba and Venezuela. The project was dubbed by Alcatel-Lucent as the `Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America -1' (ALBA-1).

The ALBA-1 project, the total cost of which was $70 million, was initially used only for connections between the governments of Cuba and Venezuela; thereby implying that most people could gain access to the Internet only via satellite-based connections.

While a recent Cuban documentary film highlighted the difficulties with Cuba's citizens face in gaining Internet access, and that those who could access the privilege of using the subterranean fiber-optic cable - which is peered to Spanish Telefonica - had to pay more than $6 per hour, a new report by route-monitoring company Renesys has revealed that things have now started to change.

As per the Renesys report, though the cable is now serving traffic inbound to Cuba's state telecom firm, Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S. A. (ETECSA), the problem still is that the connection goes only one way - `inbound' - apparently because, as Renesys senior analyst Doug Madory elaborated in a Monday blog post, "ETECSA enjoys greater bandwidth and lower latencies (along the submarine cable) when receiving Internet traffic."