Comcast is focussing on its Internet Essentials program, which provides broadband to low-income Americans for $9.95 per month. Now, new, qualifying customers can sign up for 60 days at no cost, and Comcast is boosting broadband speeds for all Internet Essentials customers. Over the next few days, it will bump speeds from 15/2 Mbps to 25/3 Mbps, and it will maintain those speeds going forward.

AT&T is taking a slightly different approach, removing usage caps. Until now, some customers have seen usage caps ranging from 150 GB to 1 terabyte per month, Motherboard explains. Users who surpassed those limits could be penalized $10 per additional 50 gigabytes, or more. It’s unclear if those caps will come back when the pandemic settles down.

We may see more ISPs taking action to improve internet speeds, access and usage soon. Today, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel called on the FCC to take aggressive action in response to COVID-19. We don’t know yet what that will look like, but if AT&T and Comcast are any indication, it could include a push to increase speeds and lift data caps.

As a result of the #coronavirus people across this country are going to be asked to move work and learning online. So NOW is a really good time for the FCC to take action to get our nation’s broadband providers to lift data caps and remove overage fees. https://t.co/1qJV7whVsR

— Jessica Rosenworcel (@JRosenworcel) March 12, 2020

Once the fiber optic cable is in place, Cuban citizens will have faster access to content hosted on Google servers, and the Cuban government will see cost savings. At the moment, ETECSA must pay third-party fees for passing traffic to sites like YouTube, Google Maps and Google.com.

Google and Cuba have a history of collaboration. Even before US-Cuba relations improved, Google made Chrome freely available throughout the country. In 2016, Obama touted Google’s plans to bring internet to Cuba. Shortly after, Google installed local servers to speed up its services, and in 2017, Google became the first foreign internet company to go live on the island.

Considering that Cuba first tested home internet in 2016 and just launched mobile internet nationwide last summer, the country has come a long way in a relatively short span. While there’s no proposed timeline for the new fiber optic cable, this agreement does establish a team of engineers to sort through the necessary details and get the project started.

Firma @ETECSA_Cuba Memorándum de Entendimiento con @Google para iniciar negociaciones sobre el servicio de intercambio de tráfico en Internet, que mejorará la calidad de acceso a los contenidos, como parte de la estrategia de #Cuba para el desarrollo y la informatización. pic.twitter.com/uHQ7hjpINX

— ETECSA (@ETECSA_Cuba) March 28, 2019