Million subscribers to mobile phone operators in Tajikistan have been left without cheap phone communication. It concerns, first of all, Tajik labor migrants working abroad, who were phoning home at the minimum price.
Tajik communications service agency has demanded that mobile phone operators switch off the next generation network (NGN).
NGN in Tajikistan numbers about one million subscribers (many of them are labor migrants working abroad, primarily in the Russian Federation). The following mobile phone companies in Tajikistan have NGN numbers: Babilon-T; Tcell (Chi Gap); Beeline (Salom); Eastera; and Intercom.
On November 27, the Communications Service under the Government of Tajikistan reportedly ordered all phone mobile companies and Internet service providers operating in Tajikistan to switch off NGN in international traffic. The communications service agency justified its decision by saying that it is done for security of the country.
Access to communications phone services with foreign IP-addresses has been blocked.
Recall, the Tajik authorities established the Unified Electronic Communications Switching Center last year and required that all Internet and mobile communications traffic be run through the single state-owned telecoms provider Tajiktelecom. The Center centralizes all telephone and Internet communications with the aim of facilitating surveillance on the grounds of combatting terrorism and extremism. It allows the government to have complete control over domestic communications without any safeguards.
The idea of creating a government-administered information gateway has been circulating since 2005. The stated aim of the recurring initiative has been to prevent “illegal” communications that could undermine national security.
The next-generation network (NGN) is a body of key architectural changes in telecommunication core and access networks. The general idea behind the NGN is that one network transports all information and services (voice, data, and all sorts of media such as video) by encapsulating these into IP packets, similar to those used on the Internet. NGNs are commonly built around the Internet Protocol, and therefore the term all IP is also sometimes used to describe the transformation of formerly telephone-centric networks toward NGN.
NGN is a different concept from Future Internet, which is more focused on the evolution of Internet in terms of the variety and interactions of services offered.
Next-generation networks are based on Internet technologies including Internet Protocol (IP) and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS).
