Azerbaijan, a former Soviet Republic in the Caucuses, is getting fiber to the home service and a nationwide speed guarantee of 10-100Mbps for all 9.3 million Azeris, no matter where they live in the country.

Most large cities will be scheduled for fiber to the home service, as part of successive annual budgets planned for telecommunications upgrades. The government has spent $182 million on telecom services so far this year, according to the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technologies.

From January to September, 673.3 kilometers of fiber optic cables were laid, primarily by Aztelekom, the country’s largest telecom provider. Much of the initial spending is for upgrades to the Azerbaijani telephone system, a combination or wired and wireless services.

The ministry plans to provide all areas of Azerbaijan with fiber speed Internet access by 2017. At present, 70 percent of Azerbaijan’s population uses the Internet and 50 percent have the service at home.

Officials claim the goal of the fiber project is to deliver blanket broadband coverage to the entire country, with speeds at least 100Mbps by 2017.

Azerbaijan sees fiber broadband as a critical part of the country’s development to meet the economic challenges of the digital economy. The government considers traditional telephone based DSL and cable modem technology wholly inadequate to the task. Presently, ADSL is the most common technology in Azerbaijan, but is limited to 2-8Mbps — performance now deemed obsolete and unacceptable by the ministry.

Azerbaijan’s largest ISP

The World Economic Forum’s report “Global Information Technology 2013″ ranked Azerbaijan 56th on the Networked Readiness Index among 144 world countries even before the fiber service is constructed. The U.S. is ranked 9th, Canada is ranked 12th.

Azerbaijan’s aggressive deployment of fiber optics has won recognition from the World Economic Forum for laying the foundation for much higher rankings in the future.

Much of the funding for the project comes from the Azerbaijani State Oil Fund, a special purpose state organization dedicated to sharing revenues from oil and gas production with the Azeri people through investments in social-economically important projects. Oil wealth is considered a national resource, not a windfall for oil industry executives and shareholders. The fund has helped build housing for persons displaced in the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, construct potable water systems, and finance public transportation and telecommunications projects.

Azerbaijan plans to manufacture its own fiber cables for the project inside the country in a joint venture with an Austrian firm.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380”]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Azerbaijani ICT.mp4[/flv]

The Azerbaijan Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technologies produced this English language introduction to telecom services and broadband (collectively called ‘ICT’) in the country.  “CIS” refers to the Commonwealth of Independent States, which includes many of the republics constituting the former U.S.S.R., as well as Russia itself.  (7 minutes)