Turkmenistan Closes Russian Telecoms Firm

The unexpected termination of a Russian mobile phone firm’s contract in Turkmenistan has hit users hard, and curbed their already restricted scope for accessing the internet.

The Turkmen authorities said the MTS company’s license expired on December 21, but some of its customers believe the real intention was to slow the introduction of new technologies which the Russian company was spearheading and which might give people uncensored access to information from outside.

MTS had become popular for the quality of its cellphone services and because of a mobile internet facility introduced in late 2009, as well as 3G flash modems launched last year which made it easier to access the internet.

“MTS provided its subscribers with broadband wireless access to web resources from mobile terminals,” one happy customer said, adding that the service was more affordable and much better quality than the state-run mobile phone company Altyn Asyr.

With MTS edged out of the market, many its former customers – wh number about 2.5 million – found themselves waiting in line to buy an Altyn Asyr SIM card for their phones.

“The telecoms market faces total collapse,” a staff member with the state Turkmentelecom agency said. “People deprived of their mobile and web connections were crowding into the national provider’s offices, which failed to cope. That made the quality of its services even worse.”

When President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov came to power in 2007, he allowed some access to the web, called for schools to have web connectivity, and allowed a number of internet cafes to open. This was a marked change from the isolationist policies of his predecessor Saparmurat Niazov.

In January 2009, Berdymuhammedov even dismissed his communications minister because mobile phone and internet connections were so poor.

Yet although it is possible to get web access at home or at one of the country’s 30 internet cafes, the authorities impose tight controls, blocking foreign websites and even social network sites they do not approve of. Visitors to internet cafes have to present ID and any messages they send and the pages they look at will be logged.

Some users believe the closure of MTS is an attempt to narrow the scope of web services still further..

“The authorities have closed MTS deliberately so as to force us to use Turkmentelecom and Altyn Asyr, which are controlled by Ministry of National Security,” said one user based in the capital Ashgabat. “Then they’ll be able to filter information flows in order to identify ‘slanderers’ and ‘enemies of the people’.”

An experienced observer of the media scene said the rapidly rising number of web users was a challenge to the intelligence services, which were finding it harder to monitor emails.

An internet café employee disagreed with such views, suggesting that MTS had been pushed out because its plans for a 3G network and high-speed data-transfer facilities created too much of a direct commercial threat to Turkmentelecom, which still offers low connection speeds.

This article was produced as part of IWPR's News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.