A look at Havana's SNET, the “street network” of Cuba's capital which at its peak had ~100K IP addresses, and its demise as state-run WiFi and 3G networks arise
Context & Ripple Effects
SNET began as a workaround: when Cubans were cut off from the open internet, youth linked more than 9K computers into a private street network, which grew to roughly 100,000 IP addresses at its peak. The state's countermove started in 2015, when Etecsa opened its first 35 public hotspots and halved access costs to just over $2 an hour.
That official expansion compounded fast — hotspot counts grew roughly 5x between 2016 and 2020, and national internet access climbed from an estimated 5-10% to 40-50% of the population (Ars Technica). Rest of World's obituary for SNET closes a five-year arc: the grassroots network is dying not by censorship alone but because the state finally offered a legal substitute.
First-order effects
- SNET's tens of thousands of Havana users now have a sanctioned alternative in Etecsa's WiFi and 3G service, so the volunteer-run network loses both its reason to exist and its user base.
- Etecsa converts years of suppressed demand into paying customers, moving Cuban connectivity from free informal infrastructure to metered state service.
Second-order effects
- With the informal network gone, Etecsa becomes the sole gateway for most Cuban internet traffic — pricing at the $2-per-hour benchmark set in 2015 now faces no grassroots competitor to undercut it.
- The foreign companies and censorship policies tracked when Cubans first came online (The Verge, 2015) now operate against a single chokepoint rather than a diffuse mesh that was hard to police.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, state telecom monopolies can absorb grassroots networks by out-competing them on convenience rather than shutting them down — a template where official access expansion doubles as consolidation of control.
- Cuba's trajectory suggests connectivity growth in restricted markets will run through licensed carriers, leaving parallel networks like SNET as a transitional artifact of the pre-access era.
The trend: As state-run carriers expand affordable access, grassroots parallel networks are being retired into history — Cuba's internet is consolidating around Etecsa's infrastructure.