The agency "Türkmenaragatnasyk" ("Turkmensvyaz") continues to develop a loan allocated by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) for the development of the Internet in the amount of $ 273 million, reports the publication "Turkmenistan: Golden Age".

As a result of the successful implementation of the projects, it is planned to provide the entire territory of the country with mobile communications and reduce tariffs for Internet services. The global investment goal of the IDB is to expand access to the Internet for the population.

“Taking into account the growing demands of the population, operators plan to reach full and widespread provision of Turkmenistan with mobile communications, including 4G, and in the near future , 5G, as well as high-speed Internet,” the newspaper writes.

A loan in the amount of $ 273 million for the development of the Internet for a period of 20 years, Turkmenistan received from the IDB back in 2018. Even then, the state news agency wrote that the residents of Turkmenistan will be connected to the Internet using 5G technology in the "near future."

In reality, since that moment, the number of restrictions on access to various resources on the Internet for residents of Turkmenistan has grown significantly. Gradually, the authorities closed access to all social networks, instant messengers (with the exception of IMO) and information resources that had ever published critical materials about the Turkmen government. As a result of the blocking, resources that have nothing to do with Turkmenistan are inaccessible to Turkmen users, for example, some sites about cooking, about web design, and the largest service for the joint development of IT projects GitHub was blocked.

Read more about the situation with the Turkmen Internet in HT's review "The Internet in Turkmenistan: Outdated Technologies, Arbitrary Censorship and Sham Development."

Since the beginning of 2021, the fight has also intensified against VPN services, which are used by almost all residents of the country to access prohibited resources. In October , regular interruptions to the work of VPN servers and applications began.

In addition, the internet connection in Turkmenistan remains one of the most expensive and slowest in the world. The maximum connection speed of unlimited home Internet available for city dwellers is limited to 2 Mbps. Such a tariff costs 200 manats ($ 57 at the state rate or $ 8.3 at the current "black market" rate ) per month. For residents of villages, unlimited Internet is not available, and the speed is limited to 512 Kbps. For connection, the ADSL technology, which is outdated in the 2000s, is used. An ethernet connection is available only in some new buildings, but the maximum available connection speed remains the same - 2 Mbps.

For foreign companies, a dedicated line connection with speeds up to currently acceptable 100 Mbit / s is offered, this service costs $ 35.7 thousand per month.

Source: Chronicles of Turkmenistan