Uzbekistan is radically improving its telecommunications infrastructure: figures and prospects

Uzbekistan is radically improving its telecommunications infrastructure: figures and prospects

The consistent reforms undertaken on the initiative and under the leadership of our President, in particular the innovative solutions being actively implemented to improve the quality of services in all spheres of public life and the well-being of our people, contribute to further strengthening the status of New Uzbekistan in the global community.

In this process, digital services play an important role in shaping the future. The reason is that today the state system, as well as banking, industry, medicine, education, security and other sectors of the economy cannot be imagined without information and communication technologies. Therefore, special attention is being paid to the development of the digital economy in our country. Important factors are the measures elaborated in accordance with the Presidential Decree No. UP-6079 on approval of the "Digital Uzbekistan - 2030" Strategy and measures for its effective implementation, approved on October 5, 2020, the New Uzbekistan Development Strategy for 2022-2026 based on the principle "For the sake of human dignity" and relevant programs of the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications Development.

It should be noted that in this process, the Uzbektelecom Joint-Stock Company, which is one of the leaders in the country, has also set itself a number of objectives. In accordance with this, with a view to further improving the quality of services provided by the company, increasing the number of subscribers and providing the population with modern telecommunication services, the large-scale work has been carried out during 2021.

In particular, for the last year the company's employees have built over 50 thousand km of fiber-optic communication lines in order to provide population and social objects in the regions with high-speed internet. Moreover, during the first half of the current year 23 000 km of cable have been laid. It is noteworthy that systematic work is being carried out in the most remote regions of the country in this process. Thanks to this, access to high-speed Internet is created for representatives of the population living in the most remote regions.

Thanks to this, telecommunication services are being improved even in remote areas of our country. In the course of this work, special attention has been paid to improving the quality of communication services and the speed of the Internet. The result of the work done in this regard is reflected in the results of the Speedtest Global Index rating (www.speedtest.net) at the end of May this year.

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That is, according to the speed of downloading wired Internet resources - with a speed of 40.16 megabits per second Uzbekistan was 86th out of 182 countries, ahead of Armenia, neighboring Kazakhstan, Turkey and Azerbaijan.

In addition, another ranking - according to Cable.co.uk, a UK-based portal, Uzbekistan ranks 21st globally for mobile internet costs and 19th for broadband wired internet services.

Also, according to the UN International Telecommunication Union's 2021 report, Uzbekistan ranked well among the 4 countries that met the UN's 2% mobile broadband price target.

Another important aspect is that the Company always takes into account the requirements of subscribers and residents when providing its services. For example, to create comfort for them, it has launched various social promotions that include various benefits. In particular, one of such projects was launched this year - the "Connect to the Internet and get a Wi-Fi router" promotion. It is worth mentioning that the duration of the successful campaign has been extended until the end of the year based on the demands of the population.

Of course, activities do not stop there, and in order to continue these activities in a planned manner, the Company has set the following priority objectives until the end of 2022:

The construction of more than 50,000 kilometers of fiber-optic lines across the country;

It is planned to increase the capacity of the transport telecommunications network to 700 Gbit/s to the regional center and to 80 Gbit/s to the district centers.

It can be said that because of these projects, by the end of the year, the population of our country will be able to enjoy high-speed Internet services and the quality of mobile communications services will have improved.

It should be noted that the Republican Inter-Sectorial Industrial Fair, organized with great outreach in this direction at the end of the year, was also attended by manufacturing companies established on the basis of Uzbektelecom JSC. Specifically, Global Optical Communication Uzbekistan, which specializes in production of fiber-optic communication cables operating in Jizzakh Free Economic Zone, and Telecom Innovation, which provides equipment and electronic means for telecommunication, data transmission, information-computer systems, radio and television, optical couplers, modems and splitters, Set-top-box tuners for digital television, USB-modems and electrical sockets. Products and services of enterprises such as Telecom Device PRO, which produces USB-modems, electrical sockets and telecommunication equipment, were presented in Navoi free economic zone.

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As is known, creation of modern telecommunication infrastructure is one of the most important factors in the development of digital economy. The scope of works carried out by Uzbektelecom in this direction is expanding year by year. In particular, within the framework of activities aimed at these targets, the total throughput capacity of the international Internet connection will be 3,200 Gbit/s in 2022. Also, Internet service tariffs for operators and providers was reduced by 42.9 percent to 30 thousand sums per 1 Mbit/sec. In addition, within the project "Expansion of backbone and multi-service data transfer networks" the capacity of transport networks to provincial centers is 600 Gbit/sec and to district centers - 60 Gbit/sec.

Another of the projects implemented by the company at the end of 2020 is the modernization and improvement of local sales and service offices, which have been consistently continued in 2021. As a result, subscribers in many regions of the country with modern technological solutions designed in a unified style Eco Hi-Tech, have the opportunity to connect quickly and conveniently all services of UZTELECOM, from home Internet to mobile communications. In particular, during 2021, 42 modernized sales and service offices opened their doors in the Republic of Karakalpakstan, several provinces, Tashkent city and Nurafshan city. At the same time the company improved online application system for convenience of subscribers and carried out active sales in remote regions of the country. In addition, in order to further improve the quality of services provided to mobile subscribers, 514 additional dealer points were established, the number of which has been increased to 2076. As a result, 2,742 new jobs were created.

As a result of the reforms carried out in the sphere, high-speed Internet coverage of all social facilities in the territory of the country is also provided, and considerable work is being done in this direction so far. To date, 80 per cent of mahallas (areas of districts), general education schools, pre-school educational establishments and medical institutions have 100 per cent access to high-speed Internet.

In May 2021, Uptime Institute certified design documentation of UZTELECOM cloud data center with Tier III classification. It is important to say here that the level of reliability of this data center corresponds to the international system Tier III classification of Uptime Institute, which means that the infrastructure of data center is reserved under the formula "N + 1", and the fault tolerance rate is 99.982 percent. The data center has a backup of all engineering subsystems and enables maintenance and repair work to be carried out without interrupting data center operations. In line with this, this data center is currently the only data center in Uzbekistan with a Tier III certificate according to Uptime Institute classification. The current upgraded configuration of the datacenter consists of more than 36 telecommunication cabinets, 200 blid servers, over 6.2PB storage system, 100Gbps data transmission system and 2 independent access points with

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transformer substations. This cloud data center provides customers with a full range of cloud services and services such as "VDC - Virtual Data Center", "VDI-Virtual Desktop Infrastructure", "Video - Conferencing", "Colocation", "Web hosting", "Cloud Video Surveillance" and others.

The company also developed MyUZTELECOM mobile application for user convenience. Thus, it became easier for subscribers to manage the required services.

To sum up, Uzbektelecom aims, above all, at rendering qualitative services to our people, creating necessary conditions for uniform use of modern information and communication technologies across the republic, and most importantly, at making a worthy contribution to the accelerated development of digital infrastructure in our country. The systematic work and social projects in this direction will continue in the current year of 2022.