0004133373@mcimail.com (Donald E. Kimberlin) (02/18/91)
Several postings in the Digest of recent times relate to
making telephone calls to Cuba from the US. A number speculated on
the age of U.S. connections to Cuba. From anecdotal history, here are
some of the details I learned while working for AT&T Long Lines in
Florida:
1.) Dating back into the 1940's, a period when AT&T and ITT
jointly owned (50% each) the Cuban-American Telephone & Telegraph
Company of the Batista era, AT&T first provided telephone calls to
Cuba via High Frequency (shortwave) radio from its Fort Lauderdale/
Ojus (FL) HF plant. To the public, this was, "Moment, please, I will
connect you to the Miami Overseas Operator." The channels provided by
shortwave fixed plant over such a short distance north-south path are
so simple that most people would never hear a sign of fading or any
static crashes ... and think they were talking on a land line.
2.) The first submarine cable to Havana from Key West was in
operation in 1950, providing 12 telephone channels. Its nomenclature
was the "type SA Submarine Carrier System," for those who may have
noted that the first transatlantic telephone cable was the Type SB
System, and been curious about where the SA ever went. I worked on
occasion in the Key West Long Lines testroom (located on the second
floor of the Southern Bell building in Key West for those who have
seen Key West and wondered where there was space for anything on that
tiny island). Its final amplifier stage was an Eimac 300 or 400 TL-
type high-frequency triode replete with dic-type neutralizing capaci-
tors that no "telephone man" ever wanted to mess with. One might won-
der at such technology in a telephone cable carrier sysems, but first
one must realize it was first-generation custom-made coaxial cable,
and it was (as I recall) 78 miles long, having a rather high capaci-
tance and no submerged repeaters. Thus, a fair amount of power was
needed to push even 48 Khz of bandwidth that far. Having no repeaters
of course also eliminated any need to send power down the cable; thus
the terminal was rather simple in comparison to what was needed for
the SB system that went across the Atlantic.
After Castro took over, there were no direct relations for
maintenance or operations between the US and Cuba, so if it worked, it
worked. If it died, months could transpire until it got put back into
service, particularly if whatever the failure was occurred in the
Havana terminal (we presumed they had no spare parts). More common
were failures that lasted a year or more if the cable itself was
physically damaged, which happend several times when ships dropped
anchor on the cable in Havana harbor. The system would just sit there
inoperative until Castro got a cableship (usually British) to come to
Havana and patch it ... then the Key West terminal would suddenly show
it was receiving pilot tones again, and the twelve circuits would
again be put to traffic with a shrug of the Plant Department
shoulders, no info available about wheo, when, how or why about the
fix.
This cable, by virtue of being the _only_ one, has to be the
topic of recent stories about "replacing the cable." (There were also
telegraph cables laid by Western Union that were beyond AT&T's
purview, of course. One that terminated in the WUTCo office in Key
West operated with a mechanical TDM (just like the book stories one
reads about Time Division Multiplexing) until well into the 1960's.
When its TDM finally died one day in the late 1960's, one of the
telephone channels from Havana suddenly appeared with FDM carrier
telegraph tones on it in the ear of Miami telephone operators. In a
day fraught with non-communicative confusion at the Miami Long Lines
office, we found the Cubans had stuck an obsolete WECo Type 40 carrier
telegraph on it, and expected AT&T to interconnect that over to the
Miami "telegraph office." They of course had no idea that AT&T and
Western Union (by now WUI for overseas telegraphy in the US) hd, at
best an arms-length relation and AT&T provided _no_ signal processing
of any form for anybody else ... only transmission channels.
In an amazing feat of AT&T monopoly-era cooperation, we found
one old man who recalled we had one old 40C Carrier Telegraph terminal
back in the dusty equipment bays where the original 1930's AT&T "toll
test- board" had been. It had been "retired in place," never serviced
for a decade or more, but still had power on it, and its ancient tubes
still all worked. Harry got it going, and we connected DC telegraph
loops over to WUI. Geting Southern Bell to cooperate and connect
loops across town was a commentary on the monopoly-era wieght that
AT&T could throw around, much unlike today. WUI later replaced that
lash-up with an FDM of their own, and later, I was told, actually got
a few FDM telegraph channels working with the Cubans over their old
telegraph cable, by getting Coherent Communications up on Long Island
to make a custom-built audio-frequency FDM terminal that needed 100
Watt amplifiers to push the tones 75 miles or so. WUI, unlike AT&T,
could ship the terminal for Havana around through England to get it
delivered to the Cubans.)
3.) Just prior to Castro taking over, AT&T and Cuban-American
had set up a tropospheric scatter radio system between Florida City
(just south of Miami) and Guanabo (just outside Havana), one of the
two (to my knowlege) only troposcatter sysems AT&T ever used. (The
other also terminated at Florida City and ran to Nassau in the Bahama
Islands.) THe Havana troposcatter was actually pure Federal Radio
tropo just like the military used all over the world, having WECo
carrier telephone equipment on it, of course. However, it operated
the same way as the Key West cable ... after Castro took over, no
coordination, no news, no nothing. It had frequency and space diver-
sity, so the Cubans might turn a receiver or transmitter off at any
time, and they did. Thus, AT&T at Florida City had to keep both
receivers and transmitters functional at all times, for they never
knew when the Cubans might turn either transmitter off, or have either
receiver inoperative.
The bandwidth of the tropo gear, of course, was wide enough to
transmit video, which was intended at the building of the system.
This could be done by either temporarily operating one diversity link
for video and the other for telephony, or by shutting down telephone
operations during video transmission (an operating mode I observed
once in Kenya when they needed their earth station to get a World
Championship boxing match off Intelsat ... apparently a `common-enough
happening that the Nairobi papers carried a news article announcing
that international telephone service would be limited while the match
was being broadcast!) But, there being no official relations between
the U.S. and Cuba, I do not know that any video was ever carried.
Rather, the voice channels from Havana were all connected to
the 4A toll switching machine at Miami, and Havana operators were able
to happily dial whereever they wanted, and anyone in the world who
dialed the appropriate digits went right through and rang the Havana
operator who completed the connection manually. Politics or not, AT&T
was not about to be the source of a Castro tirade against the American
Imperialists, so AT&T just let the traffic flow, for several years,
until Castro's unpaid, unsetteld bills reached untold millions. Cuba
had enjoyed chatting with the world via the U.S. for almost a decade
without paying for it. ( I can hear it now: "Just dial me in Havana,
Comrade. The stupid capitalists are paying for it.") When AT&T and
the State Department finally waltzed around it enough, there was
agreement to cut the circuits off one day. Cutting off another nation
is _serious_ business inside AT&T; in fact, it had never really been
done by that time. Remember that AT&T had to always tell the Feds
that the President and State Department can ring up any Ambassador or
dictator any time they want.
In any event, it was only hours before the Cubans communicated
with AT&T and agreed to AT&T's terms that all future calls sould be
paid for on the U.S. end, at least until the Cubans' share offset the
unpaid balance. Thus began an era of "collect only" on outbound calls
from Cuba and "no collect" on inbound calls to Cuba.
4.) Meantime, the Cubans had some few other links via HF radio
to places like Spain and Mexico, limited in quantity, and from my own
observations of their endless days of test transmissions on HF, not
very successful. So long as the Yanquis were providing the tropo, who
cared much? Did the CIA listen in to Castro? Probably, but not in any
way that was visible to me.
This whole operation is the "93 circuits" referred to in
recent press, and it likely is still the only present link to the U.S.
5.) The satellite era offered change for all this, of course,
and the Russians provided Cuba with capability to operate to the
Molnya system of satellites, so there likely was ease on Castro's
chats with the Chairman in Moscow. But, the AT&T link remained, and
remains what AT&T's myopic view publishes as the only link Cuba has to
the outside world. It's certainly likely the AT&T link is of
secondary importance to Cuba by now. With the flying of Mexico's
Morelos satellite, it's most likely the Cubans have plenty of capacity
via Mexico and likely other Latin nations to the outside world. Forget
notions of Fidel with microphone and earphones talking to Noreiga or
the Sandanistas.
Finally, this leads to recent news about AT&T prosecuting some
people in Florida who were offering telephone service to Cuba by un-
known means. The following bit from "AT&T Newsbriefs" tells a bit
about it:
AT&T NEWS BRIEFS
Thursday, February 14, 1991
CUBAN CONNECTION -- The FCC has opened an investigation into a new
[Fla.] business that has made calling Cuba less time-consuming - but
more expensive. The owners of Tele Caribe ... won't divulge the
secret of connecting calls to Cuba within minutes rather than the
hours it usually takes through AT&T operators. Telecommun- ications
experts speculate the company could be re-routing calls through
another country that has direct-dial access to Cuba. Another
possibility is transmitting calls through a satellite signal. ...
Miami Herald, 2B, 2/13. Also El Neuvo Herald, [Florida], 1B, 2/13.
# # #
Now that you know the whole story, you can see how easily
they could now be selling calls via Mexico or another Latin nation,
and cheating AT&T out of business ... a matter deeply frowned upon by
both AT&T, its friends in the government, and its step brothers of the
telephone cloth!
(Readers on here who have access to the current CCITT Plan Documents
for the Caribbean can certainly tell us all the places Cuba now has
circuits to.)wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu (David Lesher) (02/19/91)
Donald Kimberlin posted a great tome about USA -- Cuba telco
connection history. I can add a few things.
1) There IS something called "Western Union Havana" that runs circuits
to Key West, I believe. I'm aware of one four-wire 75 baud [WOW ;-]
teletype link, and several Telex 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.
3) The Soviot Chancery has several four-metre {+/-3db ;-} dishes that
I assume talk to one of their birds.
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.
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.
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?
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. Ironically, however, the three
"international" hotels in town all have new Mitel systems, an off
shoot of all the business the Canadians do with Cuba. Just don't count
on anything happening when you dial "9." Maybe when everyone is done
fixing up the GDR's system, they should stop by Cuba.
wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu (305) 255-RTFMroy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (02/19/91)
Donald E. Kimberlin writes (in a very interesting essay): > More common were failures that lasted a year or more if the cable itself > was physically damaged, which happend several times when ships dropped > anchor on the cable in Havana harbor. Telecom readers might be interested to know that the US Coast Pilot (sort of the offical government AAA guide for mariners) has a note in it for New York Harbor that underwater cables abound, and that AT&T will gladly compensate the owner of any ship who's captain cuts away his anchor rather than trying to pull it up if he suspects he has snagged a cable. Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
0004133373@mcimail.com (Donald E. Kimberlin) (02/19/91)
In a reply to the original posting, Digest V11, iss129 has a reply from David Lesher <wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu> 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.)