Iran Cuts The Internet Price by 50% and Yes There Is a But

Iran cuts the internet price by 50%, this might seem to be a great news but the tricky part is that it’s only for three VODs (Video on Demand).

Internet connections have improved massively over the past 2 years but with all that improvement, there is still a lot of room for developments. Yes, in comparison to three years ago we couldn’t have imagined having a skype call anywhere with our cellular data on our smartphones but now we can say that at least we can have that skype call arranged with the cellular data. The services are bad in comparison to western countries, and we don’t expect anything more for now. But something interesting is happening on the way, and what is that?

Iranians are tech-savvy and they have learned to keep up with the new technologies really fast. And the current trend is Video on Demand. People want multimedia content and it’s getting off the ground with a fast pace. But there is a little problem on the way and that’s the internet prices in Iran. As you may know Internet prices in Iran are heavily based on the traffic that you use. Currently, the average internet price set by the government and ISPs is 3,600 Toman (Nealy $1) per Gigabyte of traffic. This price might go up or down based on how much traffic that you want to buy. With the minimum wage of $250 (Monthly) considering the services, the internet is kind of expensive for multimedia contents. People tend to use multimedia more and more each day and even some studios started some programs online even though the internet traffic is expensive for most people.

Apart from this trend among people, the government is also after domestic content production because they want people to use content that is allowed by the law generally meaning it should be suitable for families. The government doesn’t want to enter content production, so the only wise choice that is left is lowering the internet prices. Iran’s National Information Network which is a domestic network to keep the data flow inside the country is an initiative that might start at the end of this summer. This network could lower the internet prices because it keeps the data flow inside the country but it’s not up and running yet. So what’s the solution here for now?

This is where the government took an initiative to bring down the internet prices for three specific VODs only with three ISPs and apparently these are the only 6 companies that have agreed to this. And who are the lucky three VODs? Filimo and Aparat from SabaIdea group and Telewebion. And the three internet providers are AsiaTech, Rightel and Shatel. So any users from these Internet providers (Rightel is an operator as well) could use these VODs with half the price of bandwidth. This act could help these companies to gain more users and more hits and therefore make more money. We shouldn’t forget to mention the cause of the price cut, TIC (Telecommunications Infrastructure Company) of Iran is going to let the ISPs and the VOD use its infrastructure for transferring the data instead of using The Internet.

This is a good initiative from the government but we hoped that we could see other websites as well.