Azerbaijan to start broadband Internet project in 2015

/AzerNews/

By Nigar Orujova

The project on the development of broadband Internet in Azerbaijan will start in 2015, Deputy Minister of Communications and High Technologies said.

The project will be implemented in the next three years, Elmir Velizade said on December 1.

The results of the first year of the project will form the basis for the work that will be done in the following years, he noted.

"The funds that will be spent in the first year of the project will be paid off in the following years. These funds will be re-invested for the expansion of broadband Internet infrastructure," Velizade said.

The ultimate goals of the project are to provide the whole country, including remote rural areas, with high-speed internet in the range of 10-100 megabits/second and to increase the share of broadband internet users to 85 percent. This will allow Azerbaijan to reach the level of other developed countries by 2017.

Currently, about 70 percent of the population uses the Internet, and the broadband Internet penetration among the population stands at 50 percent.

The total cost of the project is estimated at more than 450 million manats, and it will run from 2014 to 2016.

The Ministry plans to provide all the settlements of Azerbaijan with high-speed access to the Internet by 2017.

The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan will allocate100 million manats to the project this year.

Under the SOFAZ's regulations, these funds can be used for the construction and reconstruction of strategically important infrastructure facilities, as well as solving important national problems.

Azerbaijan is taking the 64th place in the world in terms of ICT development, the International Telecommunication Union has said.

Azerbaijan is adopting measures to develop the non-oil segment of its economy. In this context, ICT is one of the prominent sectors, and the income of Azerbaijan's information technology sector has doubled in the past five years.