Turkmenistan is one of the most closed countries in the world. Not as closed as, say, North Korea, but close. An important difference is the public Internet, to which a citizen of the country can connect without any problems. This article talks about the situation with the Internet industry in the country, the availability of the network, the cost of connection and the restrictions imposed by officials.
When did the Internet appear in Turkmenistan?
Under Saparmurat Niyazov, the Internet was exotic. At that time, several points of connection to the global network worked in the country, but only high-ranking officials and security officials had access, rarely civilian users. There were several medium-sized Internet providers. In the early 2000s, some companies were closed, while others were merged. As a result, a state monopoly appeared - the service provider "Turkmentelekom". There are also small provider companies, but all of them, in fact, are daughters of Turkmentelecom and are completely subordinate to it.
After President Berdymukhammedov came to power, Internet cafes appeared in Turkmenistan and network infrastructure began to develop. The first modern Internet cafes appeared in 2007. Turkmenistan also has a cellular network of the third and fourth generations. Any resident of the country can connect to it, and hence to the Internet. You just need to buy a SIM card and insert it into the device.
How much does the Internet cost and what do you need to connect?
Everything, like in most other countries, the provider needs to provide an application. Within a couple of days, a new subscriber is connected. With the pricing policy, everything is somewhat worse. According to the calculations of experts from the World Bank, the Internet in Turkmenistan is the most expensive among the countries of the former USSR. One gigabyte here costs 3,5 times more than in Russia. The cost of connection is from 2500 to 6200 rubles per month. For comparison, in the capital's state institution, the salary is about 18 rubles (113 manats), while salaries for representatives of other professions, especially in the regions, are much lower.
As mentioned above, another option for connecting to the Internet is mobile communications, 4G networks. After the 4G infrastructure had just appeared, the speed was up to 70 Mbps even outside the city. Now, when the number of subscribers has increased significantly, the speed has decreased by 10 times - to 7 Mbps within the city. And this is 4G, as for 3G, there is no 500 Kbps here either.
According to the American agency "Akamai Technologies", the availability of the Internet for the population in the country is 20%. One of the providers in the capital of Turkmenistan has only 15 users, despite the fact that the population of the city exceeds 000 million people.
The average Internet connection speed for users across the country is below 0,5 Mbps.
As for the city itself, the Ministry of Communications a year and a half ago that in Ashgabat the speed of data transfer between data centers reaches an average of 20 Gbps.
The mobile infrastructure is well developed - even small towns are covered by the network. If you go beyond these villages, then there will also be communication - the coverage is not bad. But this applies to the telephone connection itself, but the speed and quality of the mobile Internet are not very good.
Are all services available or are there blocked ones?
In Turkmenistan, many well-known websites and services are blocked, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vkontakte, LiveJournal, Lenta.ru. WhatsApp, Wechat, Viber messengers are also unavailable. Other sites are also blocked, in most cases those that publish criticism of the authorities. True, for some reason the website of MTS Turkmenistan, the women's magazine Women.ru, some culinary sites, etc. were blocked.
In October 2019, access to the Google cloud was closed, so users lost access to such company services as Google Drive, Google Docs and others. Most likely, the problem is that this service hosted a mirror of an opposition site in the summer.
The authorities are most actively fighting against blocking bypass tools, including anonymizers and VPNs. Previously, mobile phone shops and service centers offered users to install VPN applications. The authorities took action and began to regularly fine businessmen. As a result, service centers removed this service. Plus, the government keeps track of the websites users visit. Visiting a prohibited resource threatens with a call to the authorities and writing an explanatory note. In some cases, representatives of law enforcement agencies may arrive on their own.
In fairness, it should be noted that a few years ago the ban on torrents was removed.
And how do the authorities block objectionable resources and track attempts to bypass blocking?
This is the most interesting moment. As far as we know, the equipment and software for tracking are supplied by Western companies. Responsible for the control of the national network and the management of the technological base of the Ministry of Security of the country.
The Ministry actively cooperates with the German company Rohde & Schwarz. Companies from the UK also sell equipment and software to the country. A couple of years ago, their parliament allowed supplies to Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Brunei, Turkey, Bahrain.
Turkmenistan needs specialists to maintain Internet filtering. There are not enough local specialists, and the government resorts to the help of foreign ones.
On Turkmenistan is purchasing two types of network monitoring equipment, R&S INTRA and R&S Unified Firewalls, as well as R&S PACE 2 software.
The monitoring is not carried out by the Ministry itself, but by two private telecommunications companies associated with it. The owner of one of the companies is a native of the state security agencies of Turkmenistan. The same companies receive government contracts for the development of websites, software, service maintenance of network equipment.
The supplied software from Europe analyzes speech and uses filters to recognize words, phrases and whole sentences. The result of the analysis is checked against the "black list". In case of coincidence, law enforcement agencies are already involved in the case. They also monitor SMS along with instant messengers.
Checking example with BlockCheck v0.0.9.8:
Fighting VPN
The authorities of Turkmenistan are fighting with varying degrees of success against VPNs due to the popularity of the technology among Internet users who do not put up with blocking major foreign sites. The government uses the same equipment from a German company to filter traffic.
Additionally, attempts are being made to block mobile VPN applications. For our part, we observe the unavailability of some users and our mobile VPN application. Only the built-in function of working with API through a proxy helps out.
We have several users from Turkmenistan in touch, and they periodically report some emerging problems with communication. One of them just suggested the idea of ββcreating this article. So, even after a successful login to the application, not all servers have a connection. It looks like some kind of automatic VPN traffic recognition filters are working. According to the same users, the best connection is with new servers added recently.
In January last year, the government went even further and access to the Google Play store.
β¦ the residents of Turkmenistan lost access to the Google Play store, from where users downloaded applications that allowed them to bypass the blocking.
All these actions only increased the popularity of blocking bypass technologies. Over the same period of time, the number of VPN-related search queries .
In the future, the Turkmen authorities promise to improve the state of the network infrastructure, increase the connection speed and expand the coverage area of ββ3G and 4G. But it is not clear when exactly this will happen and what will happen next with the locks.
Source: habr.com