Afghanistan signed a contract with Iran to import 10 Gbps internet bandwidth from the country. They are also waiting to receive service level agreement contract from Iran to ensure it’s quality.
Telecommunication Infrastructure Company of Iran (TIC) and Afghan Telecom are doing technical preparation to provide internet bandwidth to Afghanistan, optimize the system. “Iran would provide required pieces of equipment for managing 100 Gbps bandwidth to Afghanistan for free to install in Herat province,” said Yasin Samim, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.
Herat province is located in the west of Afghanistan near the Iranian border. It is supposed to route the internet from Iran to Herat in Afghanistan and then transfer to Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul and Nangarhar via optical fiber. “Optical fiber network in the form of Ring or Mesh topologies have been implemented in different provinces of Afghanistan. After signing service level agreement and synchronizing the internet systems between the two countries, the newly bought internet bandwidth will be added to this network and users can access it,” added Samim.
The spokesman for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, hopes the technical jobs of transferring the internet from Iran to Afghanistan will be done by next month so that they can increase the speed of internet while decreasing its cost.
Afghanistan has already paid $250 thousand to Pakistan instead of 20 Gbps internet bandwidth per month. Kabul is also going to cancel the contract of purchasing the internet from Pakistan. The country also imports 20 Gbps of internet bandwidth from Kyrgyzstan, 10 Gbps routes from Turkmenistan and 10 Gbps routes from Uzbekistan.
The cost of internet bandwidth from Kazakhstan is $135 thousand per month for 10 Gbps. Kyrgyzstan has also announced that they are ready to sell internet bandwidth to Afghanistan with the same price.
Leave a Reply