Mobilising Tajikistan

As Tajikistan’s state-run phone company announces plans to expand the network of landlines in rural areas, experts polled by NBCentralAsia suggest the future lies with mobile phones.



The Avesta news agency reports that Tajiktelecom is launching a 20 million US dollar project next year to provide better communications outside the towns. By the end of the project, which Tajiktelecom is currently funding out of its own resources, there should be a public phone box in every village in the country.



A senior official in the ministry of transport and communications says Tajiktelecom will not be able to complete this project out of its own funds, so a number of investment projects have been designed and talks are under way with commercial banks in China, among other possible partners.



“This is an attractive sectors for investors – but they are asking for an increase on phone charges,” said the official.



When rates were last increased, including the introduction of payment by the minute for calls, it was to repay a 15 million dollars loan the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development granted in 2003 for the shift from analogue to digital phone technology. That price rise proved very unpopular.



Despite Tajiktelecom’s ambitious plans, experts interviewed by NBCentralAsia predict that mobile phones will soon be the dominant means of communications in rural Tajikistan. Even now there are one and half times more mobile users than there are landline subscribers, who number about 400,000.



Competition between nine mobile phone companies means it is now generally cheaper to use a cellular phone than a landline in urban areas.



Laying phone lines is costly, and the mobile companies are already interested in providing coverage in rural areas. Tajiktelecom could therefore lose much of this rural market in a short space of time, the experts say.



Gulmahmad Kayumov, director of the Ttmobile firm, says it is much cheaper for mobile companies to extend coverage to remote mountainous and rural areas.



“There’s a huge cost to putting landlines into rural areas, including copper cable and telephone poles, and it is all reliant on the availability of electricity. At the moment, a kilometer of copper cable costs over 4,000 dollars. In financial terms, it will take a long time to recoup these costs, so no investor is going to want to do this,” he said.



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)