Cubans would benefit from having access to the internet... Cloudflare doesn't provide any of that, nor is a PoP required in Cuba for Cubans to browse websites (even those running behind Cloudflare). Nor will Cubans benefit from a data center being built in Cuba, since majority of said data center's clients will be internationals (not businesses nor people in Cuba).
It does seem like a Cloudflare PoP in Cuba is merely for the novelty.
It seems shortsighted to say "Cubans won't benefit" because international people will benefit first. If more international people go to Cuba, whether for tourism or to invest in businesses, or start businesses, isn't there a benefit to the Cuban people? And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone.
In the US the benefits of the connected network initially reached only the US DoD and its partners. Then university communities. Then early tech companies. Then everyone.
> And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone
Yes, but as a paying Cloudflare customer, I'd much rather Cloudflare spend their/my money tangibly improving their service, not propping up a small nation's economy in some sort of idealistic hope that better things will follow.
From my understanding, and from the article's description, most Cubans simply don't have easy access to the internet, or in some cases, no access at all. So putting in data centers which will primarily service foreign corporations seems very imperialistic as well as opportunistic (cheap land, cheap labor, etc).
They need last-mile carriers more than anything, and even though ISP's generally terminate at a data center, there's a whole lot that must happen first before Cubans will feel any benefits.
So, Cloudflare adding a PoP in Cuba by 2017 seems to have zero benefits, for anyone really. Even after Cloudflare does setup a PoP, the benefits to Cubans are minimal-to-none.
Perhaps if Cloudflare is simply itching to burn extra money, they could instead consider lowering the price of their business tier - making it immediately more accessible for more companies. This brings SSL to more sites, protects them from attacks, and can in some cases dramatically improve performance. Those a tangible benefits for the entire internet.
Most Cubans don't have internet access today because $2 for wifi access is a lot of money, and there are still restrictions, and you either buy it illegally or show your id at a government office and face the risk that someone has decided to pay attention to you.
But the success of things like in this article shows that there are a lot of desire for access, which means that once internet connectivity is liberalised and prices tumble, there is likely to be a large demand quite quickly. Yet from a population that is not likely to be able to pay for large upgrades to external links very quickly.
That's an ideal scenario for Cloudflare, in that you'll have demand from Spanish-language businesses outside Cuba to reach a market that once the floodgates opens is likely to grow very rapidly, especially due to the sheer amount of people in the US with connections to the island. If you can broker reduced latency, it will be a big competitive factor for Spanish language businesses that wants to target Cuba but doesn't want to put servers locally.
So don't worry. I doubt Cloudflare is hoping to burn your money to make a political statement (though who knows, it might very well pay for itself in PR), but rather is looking at it in terms of actual business potential.
Also, I don't know what the minimum size of a Cloudflare pop is. Unless they've said something (I haven't looked), for what we know the minimum they need is to be able to rent a 1U slot for a server in a suitably well connected data centre for smaller locations.
I've worked at places where "setting up a POP" meant exactly that, and I've worked at places that insisted on setting up $2 million monstrosities in custom built racks no matter how small the local market was. Unsurprisingly, the latter company went bankrupt.
I haven't used Cloudflare, but aren't you paying to make your website globally available? Good access from Cuba is one small part of that. Maybe not the part you care about, but other people might - that's what happens with bundling.
> aren't you paying to make your website globally available?
No, any website (unless blocked by a nation-state) is by default accessible globally.
Yes, Cloudflare's CDN offers increased performance for global visitors, but with so few people online in Cuba, there's very little sense in fronting the cost of building all this infrastructure just to have a Cloudflare PoP there. There's many other nations much larger and better connected that CloudFlare does not have a PoP in, so why pick Cuba?
Cubans have bigger concerns than getting a page to load a few milliseconds faster. Getting online in the first place might be a bigger concern for starters...
You pay a CDN to get better performance (globally) than you would get by default. It's up to the provider to decide what "better performance" means and build more infrastructure to support that.
As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick about how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved (which new endpoints to open). You pay your money and they decide which countries to spend it on.
> As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick about how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved
This was a public discussion, and therefore I have every right to "chime in".
As a paying customer, I have even more of a right to "chime in", as Cloudflare decisions may impact my business.
Putting a PoP in Cuba because "bleeding hearts from decades of terrible government policy" isn't a sound business decision. Nobody has offered any better explanation of advantages other than the novelty, and frankly, if that's the core reason... that's a bad decision and a blatant waste of money.
> Cubans have bigger concerns than getting a page to load a few milliseconds faster.
A big concern for Cubans could very well have, is having webpages load several seconds faster (I don't think we're talking miliseconds). They are paying per minute.
We issue SSL certificates for all plans, including our Free tier, and terminate HTTPS traffic all over the world. You don't need a Business plan for that.
It does seem like a Cloudflare PoP in Cuba is merely for the novelty.