Network diversification

The key tendency of the development of Az-erbaijan's telecommunications market in the foreseeable future is the formation of a multi-level and diverse internet infrastructure. The Europe Persia Express Gateway (EPEG) fibre-optic cable route, built at the initiative of Russia, Iran and Oman and going through the country, is the most important component of this system. The Azerbaijani operator of international communication lines - the Delta Telecom company, recently announced the launch of the commercial use of this communication line.

Azerbaijan became involved in Europe Persia Express Gateway, a major international fibre-optic cable project, four years ago. Initiators of the project which is estimated at 250m dollars, the Russian Rostelecom, the Iranian Telecommu-nication Infrastructure Company (TIC), the Omani Omantel and the British company Cable & Wireless (C&W), last autumn completed work on laying the cable with the capacity of up to 3.2 terabits per second and overall length of about 6,000 kilometres. The line which started in Frankfurt in Germany, stretched to Oman and went through territories of three transit countries - Poland, Ukraine and Azerbaijan who are not immediate participants in the EPEG consortium. Testing works were carried out at the line at the beginning of the year 2013. 

"The fibre-optic cable route EPEG was officially launched recently and participants in the consortium started to use it commercially. Part of capacities of the cable route has already been activated. Shareholders of the Cable & Wireless company and Omantel started an active campaign to attract transit traffic," Delta Telecom company director, Ramazan Valiyev, said. That the EPEG has great commercial potential is confirmed by the fact that by the year 2016, shareholders plan to increase the overall capacity of the cable route five times, to reach up to 15 terabytes. Valiyev said that the EPEG promises to become a highly profitable venture in the future and increased revenues to Azerbaijani state budget - first of all, at the expense of transit bonuses, as well as significant reduction of internet traffic costs. 

The latter factor is particularly important given the fact that despite a favourable geographic location (junction between Europe and Asia), Azerbaijan is away from global internet centres and backbones (fibre-optic IP routes), specially designed for internet traffic. Therefore, for many years Azerbaijan was forced to use internet traffic supplied through domestic cable networks of a number of other countries. This inevitably caused technical difficulties in the connection process and significantly increased prices of internet traffic. Now, with the launch of the EPEG route, Azerbaijan can rely on more reasonable prices for connecting to the worldwide web. 

Interestingly, with an aim to cut internet traffic prices and achieve reliability of internet connection, in August 2012, Delta Telecom completed works on the creation in Frankfurt of its own internet hub which made it possible to transfer 1.4 terabyte traffic from Europe to Azerbaijan. "The creation of such a platform gave our country a direct access to Tier1-operators (primary providers), significantly enhanced technical reliability and significantly cut costs on supplies of internet traffic from Europe to Azerbaijan. While earlier we carried out traffic from each of the 300 content providers through various Tier1 operators, now all this traffic is concentrated into one router at the central knot in Frankfurt and is then sent to Azerbaijan in a bulk," Raid Alakbarli, the technical director of Delta Telecom, said. 

The joining of the Frankfurt hub to backbones leading to Azerbaijan, including the EPEG line, facilitates the improvement of network capabilities. "The participation of the Delta Company in the implementation of the EPEG project will make it possible to use more comprehensively Azerbaijan's fibre-optic infrastructure for creating a new transit route and will significantly improve our country's connection to the international internet network," Az-erbaijani minister of communication and information technologies, Ali Abbasov, said. He stressed that the route is the shortest alternative connecting Europe with Central Asia through underwater cables. Import-antly, the project is viewed as a part of the strategy of Azerbaijan's transformation into a technology hub - a key information centre of the Caspian Region. 

The formation of advanced network infrastructure and the renovation of switchboard facilities of the project is another important advantage of the country's participation in the EPEG project. After the conclusion in May 2009 of an agreement on the creation of the first Azerbaijani-Russian-Iranian joint enterprise C-Ring Telecom, large-scale works started in Azerbaijan for the formation of the EPEG segment, and the subsequent completion of the fibre-optic transmission lines of the Caspian Region countries. In recent years the company invested over 17.5 m dollars in the Azerbaijani segment; a trans-border fibre-optic crossing was laid on the Derbent-Quba section and an international communication line was created with the capacity of over 10 gigabits per second. Equipped with modern technologies, the internetwork junction provides international communication, rent of main channels, services on the IP MPLS base, internet access, access to data processing centres and call-centre. 

In addition, Azerbaijan's successful participation in the EPEG project will provide significant support for the implementation of another international venture - Trans-Eurasian Super Information Highway (TASIM) which was initiated about 4.5 years ago and envisages uniting over 20 counties of Europe and Asia into one high-speed information network. In November 2009 and December 2012, the TASIM project received unanimous support by the UN General Assembly. The implementation of this project involved such countries as Russia (Rostelecom), Kazakhstan (KazTransCom), Turkey (Turk-Telecom), China (ChinaTelecom), as well as Azerbaijan's Azertelekom. At the initial stage by at the end of the current year, the regional countries and operators plan to create the main transit internet infrastructure, uniting the West and the East, and achieve commercial success. At the second stage, there is a plan to create transit infrastructure to provide internet connection for Eurasian countries that have no direct access to international internet hubs. The next step will be laying new fibre-optic lines, modernizing the existing ones and joining them to the TASIM network. 

This way, backbones of EPEG and TASIM will provide Azerbaijan with reliable and cheap access to the worldwide web. The Fiber to Home state programme, which was launched this year, will distribute high-speed, broadband internet to users across the country. This large-scale project envisages essential modernization of distribution systems of IP channels and the creation of fibre-optic infrastructure across the country.