Beltelecom: 3.06m broadband and 1.51m IPTV subscribers at end-2016

Belarus’ Ministry of Communications and Informatisation (Minsvyazi) has issued a press release on its website outlining some of the key developments in the Republic’s telecoms market in FY 2016. The ministry statement confirmed that at the end of last year, Belarus ranked 31st (out of 175 countries) on the ICT Development Index, 23rd where it comes to the development of broadband internet access and 49th in the ranking on the index of readiness for e-government. Moreover, Minsvyazi notes that at 31 December 2016 national PTO Beltelecom had a total of 3.06 million broadband subscribers, including some 1.09 million Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Networks (GPON) connections. Further, there were 1.51 million IPTV customers and bandwidth of the country’s external/international internet access channel increased by 137Gbps last year to 1.1Tbps. Finally, Minsvyazi also provided an update on the progress of 4G LTE deployment in Belarus, pointing out that by 31 December 2016, 41.5% of the population were covered by advanced mobile networks. By end-2018, Belarus intends to have covered all district centres and settlements with a population >50,000, and envisages the build-out of more than 1,000 base stations to achieve this.