POTS in .AF

Sat Apr 12 16:53:22 UTC 2003

      On Sat, 12 Apr 2003, Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine wrote:
    > The numbers are CPE-to-PSTN w/dedicated port, per 100 persons.
    > .af 1988  0.20 1998  0.00 (last date data available)

    > Main Telephone Lines in Operation per 100 Persons (Number)
    > Main telephone lines refer to the telephone lines connecting a
    > customer's equipment to the Public Switched Telephone Network and
    > which have a dedicated port on a telephone exchange.

Having just returned from Kabul, where PCH has been assisting the
Afghan Ministry of Communications, I can tell you that things are bad, but
not nearly as bad as those numbers would suggest...  Those numbers are for
copper (of which there are about 33,000 subscribers in Kabul) and don't
include mobile phones, which about double that.  In addition, a second GSM
provider has been licensed, and is starting their build-out, and the
second provider is funded by the Aga Kahn and will probably be providing
very low-cost service.  So things there are looking up.

There's a bit of a tussle right now between overseas bell-heads who are
trying to sell old SS7 switches into Afghanistan and are lobbying the
MoC to outlaw VoIP and define the Internet as an application that runs
over 64K switched channels, versus the younger guys in the MoC who are
trying to define a relatively progressive telecoms regulatory environment
which would allow domestic Afghan telecoms investment, more like the New
Zealand regulatory scheme.  In such an environment, of course, voice is an
application which runs on top of the Internet.  :-)

So it's been interesting working with them.  I just hope they don't
succumb to the bribes and threats the bell-heads are plying them with.

                                -Bill