Cuba plans to beam Wi-Fi signals at 35 public spaces in the first such offering for the population at large, whose web access has been mostly limited to desktop rentals in state-owned internet parlours.

Cuba will also cut the price for surfing the net from $4.50 to $2 an hour, Luis Manuel Diaz Naranjo, the chief spokesman for Etecsa, the state telecommunications monopoly, told the official newspaper, Juventud Rebelde, on Thursday.

The communist-led island has one of the lowest internet usage rates in the world with very little home broadband service and extremely high rates for foreigners and a tiny number of homes and businesses which are allowed to be wired.

Only 3.4% of Cuban homes are connected, and most of those have intranet, not internet, data from the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency, has shown.

But Cuban officials have been commenting increasingly about demand for better internet access.

At the same time the US has promoted the internet in Cuba as part of the recent opening to its longtime nemesis, in which, for example, it relaxed its economic embargo of Cuba to allow US companies to do internet-related business there.

The Wi-Fi signals will be beamed to 35 public spaces, including five in Havana, Diaz Naranjo said. Each spot would be able to handle 50 to 100 users with a speed of one megabit a second each user.