OUTPERFORMING TO CATCH UP

For the best part of two decades BakuTel's annual international exhibitions have served as a kind of shop window, demonstrating the achievements of the Azerbaijani telecommunications sector, and also as a place where the world's biggest IT companies can show off their long-term plans regarding our country. Just as important is the fact that the expositions at the forum help us to trace the leading trends in the local information market, defining the sectors of its development for a relatively long period.

Technology of the future

This year 160 companies from 23 countries, including eight collective expositions, among which were national groups from Austria, Israel, Canada, France, Lithuania, Croatia and Estonia, arrived in Baku to take part in the communications exhibition organized by the Iteca Caspian company. This year the exhibition was attended by a national group from Slovenia. Over 40% of the displays were presented by regular participants, including leading local and foreign IT companies, mobile operators, distributors, communications operators and service companies. The exhibition also included such segments as telecommunications, broadband communications and technology, wireless communications, satellite communications and technology, television and radio broadcasting equipment and technology, software and automization systems and IT and office technology.

Like last year, BakuTel-2012 demonstrated the most popular long-term development trend in the ICT sector. I am talking about the most widespread and profitable area - the development of mobile communications technology, in particular the introduction of fourth-generation (4G) standards, combining high-speed mobile access to broadband internet channels, as well as top-quality radio-communications technology. It was only comparatively recently - in December 2009 - that the country's first 3G network of the Azerfon company was launched, and last November similar systems were launched by other cellular communications operators, such as Azercell, Telecom and Bakcell. And the irresistible current of scientific-technical progress is urging the players in the market towards introducing the next technological level - 4G networks based on LTE (Long-term Evolution) technology. With the introduction of 4G technology ultra-broadband access to the internet, the streaming of multi-media applications, including a review of the "heavy" video content of the quality of FullHD-1080, not to mention the possibility of making appreciably cheap international telephone calls through a denser batch data transmission, have all become possible. 

Azercell Telecom was the first company to make this innovative breakthrough in the middle of this year. After the Russian "MTS" and "Megafon" this is the third operator in the CIS to offer 4G broadband services at a speed of 40-65 mb/sec. In introducing

LTE technology to the Azerbaijani market, Azercell Telecom is at the same time getting ahead of itself, because in the next few years one can expect radical changes and a shifting of priorities: from the use of voice services (telephones) to data transmission services. And other players in the market are also striving to stake out their niche in this segment.

Having concluded a contract for the sum of $80m with Nokia Siemens Networks a year ago, Azerfon is completing the refurbishment of the fourth generation of a significant part of its base stations in the capital and other large towns. At the same time, Azerfon has become the country's first mobile operator to provide access to mobile communications and broadband internet on AZAL liners. The potential of this service was demonstrated in the company's pavilion at BakuTel-2012, and after visiting the exhibition Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev made the first call - to Olympic medallist Rovsan Bayramov, who was in an aircraft on his way to a competition in Paris.

The prospects for the development of third- and fourth-generation networks were also demonstrated at the stand of Bakcell, which recently concluded an agreement on strategic partnership with a world leader in the introduction of LTE technology to the mobile industry - the company Qualcomm Incorporated. Labelled an "updated reality", this service offers Bakcell subscribers the possibility of a live (direct or indirect) image of the physical and real environment, the elements of which are augmented by such details as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.

The new possibilities that emerged with the entry into the providers market of cable television operators Aile NET and AG Telekom (KATV1), which were demonstrated at BakuTel-2012, have become a no less significant event in the country's internet space. Unlike ordinary providers that transmit a signal by means of a copper cable using ATC switchgear, the services offered by the cable operators are carried out by means of an optic-fibre network, where a direct current speed of up to 50-100 mb/sec is perfectly attainable, which the owners of ordinary ADSL modems using telephone lines just cannot reach. KATV1's internet services are currently only accessible to people in two neighbourhoods in the capital, but in the future it is planned to extend them to the rest of Baku.

At the same time Aile NET is already offering the possibility of using a speed from 2 to 100 mb/sec virtually throughout the capital, and since quite recently also in the central part of Ganca and the Yeni Ganca region.

It is obvious that the switch of the cable-television companies to the internet in the near future will put pressure on the market of ordinary ADSL providers which cannot compete with them either for price or speed of transmission. An exception here could be the suppliers of wireless internet, such companies as Sazz 4G Internet, which has for a long time occupied leading positions in Baku, Xirdalan, Sumqayit and Mingacevir, and since the beginning of November this year has been offering its services in Ganca, too. In the course of the next few months the company plans to assimilate the internet-market of Seki, Zaqatala, Quba, Lankaran, Masalla and other regional centres in the country.

At the BakuTel-2012 exhibition MSIT also made known its plans to introduce an infrastructure based on fibre-to-home technology which provides users in the country with high-speed access to the global network. To implement the project, which is set until 2016, about AZN 450m will be invested and about 18,000 km of optic-fibre cable will be laid, more than twice as much as has been introduced in the country until now. Eventually it will be possible to link remote villages to broadband internet with a speed of at least 5mb/sec, in district centres to 30 mb/sec and in major towns 1GB and over.

"Azerbaijan is in the global trend, having managed in just a few years to increase the depth of the penetration of its broadband services from 5 to 20%. The future of the global communications sector is, undoubtedly, in mobile broadband communications, and in this segment your country is also demonstrating a high level of development," Dr Hamadoun Toure, the general secretary of the International Telecommunications Union, believes.

Leading positions in the CIS

The vast amount of work carried out by the Azerbaijani government and, in particular, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, to extend access to the global network, was highly praised by the members of the 7th Global Forum for the Management of the Internet IGF-2012, which took place from 6 to 9 November as part of the BakuTel-2012 exhibition. Organized at the initiative of the Azerbaijani government with the support of the UN, this forum brought together over 1,500 representatives of governments, leading international organizations (such as the UN and the ITU), civilians, the internet community and private companies from over 100 countries. The key subject of the forum was management of the internet aimed at stable human, economic and social development, as well as conducting a dialogue between international and national structures, the private sector and the civil society on questions of the policy of the state's regulation of the internet.

Our country has performed very reasonably in all the aforementioned aspects, especially in transparency of regulation, access and breadth of scope of internet resources. The situation in this sphere was expressed most succinctly in Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev's letter of greetings to the participants of the forum. "Today the internet is not only a means of exchange of information but also an environment embracing state administration, education, health, business, banking and other spheres, creating new values. Protection of human freedoms, as well as the development of the electronic media, ensuring the open and transparent work of the government and attracting citizens to the processes of state administration are some of the important directions of the work of the modern internet network, and these opportunities are being supported in every way in our country," Ilham Aliyev said.

The head of state said that internet-radio and television, electronic newspapers and magazines, foreign and domestic networks are widespread in our country and thousands of bloggers operate freely over the Azerbaijani internet. The head of state also noted that thanks to the development of modern technology in the country, about 65% of the population have regular access to the internet, and Azerbaijan was one of the first post-Soviet countries to introduce the latest technology of mobile broadband access to the network - 4G.

Speaking at the forum, ITU's General Secretary Hamadoun Toure called for joint work to ensure that all people on the planet can receive access to a high-quality, inexpensive internet. "We need to recall the articles of the General Declaration of Human Rights which guarantee free access to information for everyone, and ICT business must strive to integrate people and attract them to state-of-the-art technology in the most remote and less well-off countries of the world," Toure said.

It should be said that for many years now Azerbaijan has been among the top places among the post-Soviet countries in rate of development of the information-communications sector. In the past decade the state's overall income from services in this sphere has increased a hundredfold to $1.5bn, according to preliminary calculations. In particular, based on the results of last year, the telecommunications sphere and the postal services have been responsible for the nearly 12% growth in revenues, and the volume of state investments in this sector has reached $412m. 

In the next ten years the Azerbaijani government plans to invest about $3.5bn in various ICT projects. These include, among others, for the implementation of the state programme for the development of fibr-to-home technology, the launch of national communications satellites and the use of space technology, the formation of a cyber-secure e-government, the spread of digital television and radio broadcasting, and also support for the wide-scale penetration of a broadband optical and wireless infrastructure to the country's regions, and so on.

The IT technology segment is also being particularly rapidly developed. This impressive dynamic has been facilitated to a significant degree by the considerable size of the domestic computer market, as well as state support for a number of projects to form a single system of e-government and the computerization of state structures, as well as an increase in the number of users in the private and corporative sectors.  This mass computerization of the country has been accompanied by a rapid growth in the infrastructure of broadband access to the internet. For example, the size of international internet channels in the past five years has increased several times and is now 200 gb/sec. Today, the level of penetration of internet access in the country as a whole has reached 65% and each user on average uses 19.102 b/sec of internet traffic. The level of penetration of mobile telephones in the country overall is in excess of 110%, and today this segment of the ICT sector is turning into a most important supplier of broadband network services.

Based on all these points the International Telecommunications Union believes it is possible to include Azerbaijan in the first ten countries of the world with the highest rates of growth of popular use of the services of mobile communications and the internet. Thus our country is already today conforming to a considerable extent to the requirements formulated in 2003 by the UN for network readiness and can be definitely included among those states of the world that have overcome the threshold of the "digital explosion".