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Mobile email service starts in Cuba


Only one telepoint in the Focsa Building was activating ETECSA's mobile email service on the first day on mobile (Photo Yusnaby)
Only one telepoint in the Focsa Building was activating ETECSA's mobile email service on the first day on mobile (Photo Yusnaby)

For 1CUC per megabyte, the expensive service from ETECSA will only be available in national accounts from nauta.cu. Activation moved slowly on the first day.

The state monopoly of communications in Cuba, ETECSA, started its service of email to cell phones on Friday, for customers with prior accounts with their company nauta.cu.

A press release published in the official press on Saturday said that, “for now, only emails from nauta.cu accounts will be able to be checked from cell phones. These accounts are obtained by opening an email account or Internet service through Nauta. Any other webmail or free email will not be accessible, that is why it is recommended to direct these emails to the Nauta account.”

The email service from ETECSA does not include international suppliers like Gmail or Yahoo.

The activation of the service requires opening a nauta.cu account in any of the ETECSA access points in the country. The accounts are valid for one year and have an activation cost of 1.50 CUC. The cell phone with access to the @nauta.cu email will be activated and set up manually at the access points of ETECSA.

The rate for use is adjusted by the Resolution 8 of 2014 from the Ministry of Communications, published in the Gaceta Official: 1.00 CUC per megabyte (MB) used.

The money will be deducted from the existing balance in the mobile phone instead of the Nauta service account. The Nauta service account only needs to be available in order to be able to use the mobile email service.

It is also required to have an application to manage the emails on the cell phone, with functions to operate SMPT, IMAP4, and/or POP3.

Last week, martinoticias interviewed reporters from the website La Singularidad, about the costs of the services. La Singularidad is a site dedicated to mock the Internet censorship in Cuba.

They calculate that “a mobile Internet client uses between two and five gigabytes per month. If we only use email, without downloading videos or heavy websites, we could only reduce this amount to 200 or 300 megabytes per month.” This means a price of 200 to 300 CUC per month, something unaffordable to any Cuban person that depends on his salary to live.

What would be even more expensive is the Internet service in cell phones that ETECSA hopes to commercialize in April. This will have an activation cost of 5.40 CUC, and 5.12 CUC per megabyte.

The website Cubanet reported that in Havana only two access points have been made available to activate email service in phones. They are located in Obispo Street in Old Havana, and in the Focsa building in Vedado.

Author, Twitter personality and photographer Yusnaby Pérez, said that the access point from Obispo Street was not working on Friday due to a server connection, so he had to go to Focsa, where there was a long wait line.

Some people told him there that they had been waiting for more than six hours because it seemed like the employees did not know how to activate the service well, and that they were taking between 30 to 40 minutes with each person.
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