Satellites crash over Siberia: Iridium bird destroyed: A defunct Russian satellite has collided in orbit with another from the Iridium satcomms fleet, according to reports. Both spacecraft were wrecked, creating two large clouds of hazardous high-speed debris. The Russian satellite was a Cosmos telecoms bird launched in 1993 and no longer in service. The other sat dated from 1997 and was an active part of the Iridium network, which was originally intended to be the world's first global mobile phone system. ...
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Internet access in Afghanistan

Friday, 20.02.2009

Telecommunication services in the country are provided by Afghan Wireless, Etisalat, TS2 Satellite Technologies, Roshan, Areeba and Afghan Telecom. In 2006, the Afghan Ministry of Communications signed a US$64.5 million agreement with ZTE Corporation for the establishment of a countrywide fibre optic cable network. This will improve telephone, internet, television and radio broadcast services throughout the country.

Internet penetration rate in Afghanistan is 0.08. Access to the Internet is often gauged by a number of registered online computers -- computers with valid IP addresses. One of the top priorities of the government of Afghanistan is to provide internet access up till small village level by 2013. Afghanistan is planning to implement IPV6 in its upcoming ICT infrastructure, which will connect almost every machine within the network to the Internet. Let’s turn to the figures again: if in 2006 there were 300,000 internet users against the population of 27,089,593 that means that every ninetieth citizen was an Internet user, in 2008 - 580,000 against 32,738,376 citizens or every fifty sixths citizen is an Internet user (according to www.internetworldstats.com data). About 500,000 (or 1.5% of the population), as ITU statistics shows, had internet access by the end of 2008. So the situation is obviously getting better.

Totally there are about 5202 IP addresses registered on the territory of Afghanistan. 3072 of them belong to the biggest Internet provider Neda. There are a lot of other smaller ones: 144 IP addresses can be found in the list of US and British embassies in Afghanistan, 768 - Segovia Company that serves NATO contingent in the region. The rest belong to the small providers such as O-stra (Kandahar) - 256 IP addresses, Tachyon 42, Bahador.net (Herat) – 320, Pelasco Kare Saypa – 256, IO Global Services (Kabul) – 256, Roshan (Morocco) – 64, Afgan Telecom (Armenia) – 16, Neda (in Russia) – 8, etc. That’s just 8 providers, actually there are 17 ones. Probably the rest use foreign companies’ IP addresses or register them outside the country, like TS2 Satellite Technologies and other satellite providers.

When people in Afghanistan use dial-up connections to reach the Internet, they must then pay access fees as well as these phone charges. Since the speed of their Internet connections is relatively slow, it takes longer to download email and web pages - which means it is more expensive, and fewer people can participate. Additionally, web pages (and email) are becoming increasingly graphic-heavy and "large" in terms of file size. For the United States and Europe, with steadily increasing bandwidth, this is not a problem. For other countries it means that, all other things remaining equal, it can actually become more expensive to use the Internet over time.

The registration of country specific domains is largely controlled by monopolies, and prices vary widely from country to country. In Afghanistan Ministry of Communications has raised Telecom Development Fund, which will be used to expand the telecom infrastructure to rural areas where the private sector is not willing to go. The telecom service providers are contributing 2.5% of their net profit to this fund. The cctld in Afghanistan is controlled by the AfgNic and is open to the private sector to resell. The tariffs for foreigners and Afghans are different, which enables Afghans to buy and use the AF widely.