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Home > Communications > Wireless > Networking
2007 Central Asian - Telecoms Statistics and Market Overview
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This market report covers eight countries in the Central Asia sub-region. It takes an overall look at the various telecoms markets, together with a particular look at the telecom statistics which describe the market in each of the following countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
The nations of Central Asia, following the winning of independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, were characteristically suffering from poor and inadequate infrastructure. Their respective telecom networks were in particularly bad condition at the time, in some cases on the verge of total collapse. The process of building and rebuilding crumbling telecom infrastructures has been a long and difficult one. Fixed-line penetration remains low across the sub-region, with no country having more than 20% fixed teledensity. More critically, a large proportion of these networks are yet to be fully converted to or replaced by digital equipment. Of course, the ability to address the need for infrastructure is closely linked to the economic prosperity of a country; whilst none of these countries is classed as a Least Developed Country, the majority have had major economic challenges to address.
The state of the fixed-line networks made it inevitable that mobile services would be seen by the governments and operators alike as the way to provide much needed communications and essentially offer a quick solution to ‘filling the gap’. It still took time for the momentum to develop, but over the last few years it has finally started to happen. Right across the sub-region, mobile markets have been booming; Kazakhstan, the most highly penetrated mobile market in Central Asia (49%), has been through a major growth surge and was continuing to grow at more than 30% per annum coming into 2007. At the other end of the scale is the lowly penetrated Tajikistan (5%), whose subscriber numbers have jumped sharply, growing by almost 150% in 2006.
One of the major challenges for these markets has been to introduce the much-needed regulatory reforms and to generally open the respective markets up to competition. Considerable progress has been made right across the sub-region on the regulatory reform front, although inevitably some countries are dong better than others. Kyrgyzstan, for example, was one the fastest of the CIS to liberalise its economy and was the first Central Asian Republic to join the WTO in 1998. Turkmenistan, while steadily rebuilding its economy, has prompted questions to be raised about governance matters. Tajikistan, which has also finally made some economic progress, suffers from the illegal drug trade and the resulting corruption within government.
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