El Paquete Semanal

August 24, 2016 11:53 AM

The Cuban CDN El Paquete is a weekly service where someone (typically found through word of mouth) comes to your home with a disk (usually a 1TB external USB drive) containing a weekly download of the most recent films, soap operas, documentaries, sport, music, mobile apps, magazines, and even web sites.

Vox: This is Cuba's Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify – all without the internet

posted by srboisvert (7 comments total)

Cuba's “Internet” is a thumb drive that moves by bus
Cuba's 'offline internet': no access, no power, no problem
posted by zabuni at 12:08 PM on August 24, 2016

El Paquete Semanal: How Offline Piracy Flourishes in Cuba
posted by zabuni at 12:10 PM on August 24, 2016

And ping times still better than Time Warner!
posted by tonycpsu at 12:28 PM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Cool! I love hacks like this. I wonder if they could benefit from Pirateboxes or Libraryboxes (A what? Short version: take a USB with any kind of data on it and hook it up to a wireless router so anyone with a mobile device/wifi can access the data there). Though if something goes wrong then you end up with a bricked router like I did... might make it expensive or difficult to replace the parts. Also the recipients would need to be able to connect to a wifi signal and the El Paquete seems to be a box that connects one user at a time, but might be more efficient for large amounts of data. Also it (the librarybox) might not be good for video, but it's great at disseminating books, papers or podcasts.
posted by Zack_Replica at 1:13 PM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's like the roflnet in Zombies, Run! But real life! I love this.
posted by lownote at 1:32 PM on August 24, 2016

Zack_Replica:

Why stop there? Why not have an entire home grown mesh network?
posted by zabuni at 3:35 PM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

So it's under a Communist dictatorship that it's actually possible to look at the internet without being under constant surveillance, your every page view and mouse pointer movement scrutinized by a hundred Eye-of-Sauron observers, without every video title you browsed through before choosing one to watch recorded and tabulated, and where you paused and re-wound the film noted down.

Tsk tsk, that will never do. We have so much to teach them about freedom.
posted by XMLicious at 7:13 PM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]