14ymedio, Havana, 14 January 2019 — After an interruption that lasted more than six hours and affected the entire country, the Telecommunications Company of Cuba (Etecsa) restored the Wi-Fi service in public areas as well as “Nauta Hogar,” the company’s home internet service.
From the early hours of Monday, the Wi-Fi zones and Nauta Hogar connections throughout the country were out of service due to a technical “interruption.” Internet users could not access web browsing from their homes or in the public wireless areas, as confirmed by an Etecsa operator.
“Our specialists are already working to solve this problem,” added the employee of the state telecommunications monopoly, but she did not specify when the service will be restored. Internet access from mobile phones is not affected by the breakdown.
“There is no electricity, no Wi-Fi in the parks, no Nauta Hogar,” activist Iliana Hernández reported on her Facebook account. Similar testimonies have been published on social networks by users from other areas of the country.
Although customers can manage to capture the Wi-Fi signal distributed by Etecsa antennas in the wireless navigation zones, they can not sign on from the service’s user portal.
This time Etecsa did not issue a statement on its website or on its social networks to explain to its customers the nature of the problem.
This newspaper was able to verify that there were also difficulties when it came to reloading credit on cell phone or Nauta accounts through the Transfermovil application.
In 2015, the first Wi-Fi zones began to be installed in squares and parks on the Island and, by the end of 2018, there were 830. In addition, some 40,000 users (out of a population of over 11 million) are connected to the Internet in their homes, through Nauta Hogar.
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