This has to be a symbolic gesture, and hopefully one that rewards Cuban Internet interests. Currently, this isn't a viable offering for the average resident. I've travelled around plenty of Cuba, and Internet there will not support streaming media. Think poor dialup speeds from the early 1990s, flakey timeouts, dropped connections constantly, and you're imagining Cuban net access.
I've not sampled the connections available to government officials, but until Cuba gets a huge overhaul (read, installation) of a proper internet infrastructure, and peering to multiple countries, they won't be able to make use of this.
Wikipedia has some figures from 2011-2013, which says the "total bandwidth between Cuba and the global Internet is just 209 Mbit/s upstream and 379 downstream" for "2.8 million users" [1]. A bit of a personal reflection, but my life would be much different, in terms of work, education, and entertainment, if I did not have access to reliable high speed internet.
A study in 2013 would have been prior to the commissioning of the ALBA-1 cable from Venezuela though. While a single link is still pretty fragile, it's likely that capacity for the island is more in the range of hundreds of GB/S to low TB/s now.
Not sure where that 2.8million users number comes from as there is no way ~20% of Cubans have internet service. (11.2mil population) Unless they count being able to get online with censored connections from some schools as having internet?
I would think one shared connection can have many users. It would be analogous to a family sharing a computer going to Facebook which counts them as four users not one, because four sets of services are being delivered. If they meant connections I think they would have said that.
Ignoring the Internet speed part, I think the average Cuban takes home around $20/month too.
Just feels like giant PR fluff, it would have been interesting to see them offer cheaper and lower bit-rate service for Cubans that won't completely saturate their networks.
I've not sampled the connections available to government officials, but until Cuba gets a huge overhaul (read, installation) of a proper internet infrastructure, and peering to multiple countries, they won't be able to make use of this.