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Folks,

I am working on a telecom background report on Cuba for Rand, a U.S. "thinktank" working for the government.

I was trying to get some Caribbean background for context and came accross inconsistent estimates of numbers of users in the Carib. by Archie and Daniel Pimienta. I have no axe to grind -- just trying to get an accurate picture.

Archie has listed actual counts of your users, which total over 2,000. Daniel, contends that many of these are relatively inactive, and estmates only a few hundred active users, based on per-user REDID traffic volumes.

Daniel also sent me the Santa Lucia user list, and although there were many users, only a few had logged on in the last 10 days.

An alternative explanation for the discrepancy would be that the REDID users are atypical in some manner, inflating their traffic volumes, and therefore skewing Daniel's estimates.

I guess Daniel would say that while there are several thousand Caribbean accounts, there are only some hundreds of active users. Would you concur? Perhaps you could look over your logs and see what percent have been active in the last 10 days, and forward that info to Daniel or me.

Would you all agree with Daniel's estimate if we counted active users as those who log in frequently (every 10 days or whatever), and are therefore, presumably incorporating the Net into their professional life?

This is only one issue. Others like network impact, user aculturation and training (human infrastructure), relationships with commercial networks, etc. are more critical than user or traffic counts.

Thanks, and, once again, I have no "side" in this debate -- I am just trying to reconcile two very different estimates, and get a picture of what is happening.

Larry Press
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