EDB Industry Report no. 9.
Globalisation of world economy and the increasing transparency of national borders elevated the role of information to a new level; information can provide critical advantages to an individual company, country or the entire region. The possession of a competitive telecommunications sector is a precondition to a nation’s entry into the global economic and information community. The telecommunications market is currently divided into a number of distinct service segments based on the following telecommunications types:
According to the world’s leading manufacturer of network equipment, Cisco Systems, by the end of 2010 video streaming will become the main generator of Internet traffic. By 2014 the global online video community will surpass 1 billion users. It would take over two years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every second in 2014. It would take 72 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks during calendar year 2014 (Cisco, 2010). These figures illustrates the prospective role of telecommunications. The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight into integration processes in the CIS telecommunications sector, the prospects for telecom companies as potential targets for investment, the region’s transit potential, and integration of CIS countries into the regional and global information community. The authors focus on the current status of telecommunications in the CIS, existing investment opportunities, cross-border investments, and major players in the mobile and fixed-line communications. Particular attention is paid to the transit potential of the region.
