Broadband

A communications association in Turkey warned on April 4 about the need for an extra 450,000 kilometers of new substructure investment in the country to fully realize the potential of the advanced 4G technologies, dubbed 4.5G, which became operation on April 1. 

Turkcell CEO Kaan Terzio?lu has called on the government to lower taxes placed on the telecommunications industry and remove obstacles to investments for the rapid increase of Internet penetration.

Türk Telekom has refused to agree to a joint fiber investment offer from other leading communications companies, Vodafone and Turkcell, stirring a debate over who will build fiber networks in the country, which has set ambitious targets in the sector. 

The number of Bulgarian households with access to the Internet at home has increased, reaching nearly 60% in 2015, a new survey has shown.   

A survey conducted by Bulgaria's statistical office NSI among 9,011 individuals aged 16 - 74 showed that 59.1% of 4,085 interviewed households had access to the Internet at home this year, an increase of 2.4 percentage points compared to 2014.

A survey presented by Spiegel reveals that European companies are the ones that provide satellite Internet to ISIS fighters.

The development of the SAS in Nemea, Peloponnese, will be a key infrastructure milestone for EAN, which was unveiled by Inmarsat last month as the first aviation passenger connectivity solution in Europe to combine an advanced satellite network and LTE-based ground network, the latter of which will be operated by Deutsche Telekom.

Inmarsat, British satellite company, has chosen Greece and the country’s largest telecommunications provider OTE to install the terrestrial satellite station of the European Aviation Network (EAN). The service will offer high-speed inflight connectivity for Europe from a Satellite Access Station (SAS) to be set up in Nemea, the Peloponnese.

A complete ban on roaming charges for using mobile phones abroad in the EU will take effect in June 2017 and clear rules on the right to internet access will become law following Parliament’s final approval of the new telecoms package on Tuesday.

Turkey has an urgent need for more mobile frequencies to meet a skyrocketing demand for broadband services and the required steps should be taken immediately to open the way for such investments, said Hasan Süel, the vice chairman of Vodafone Turkey's executive board. 

Bulgaria has overtaken South Korea as "the country with the highest broadband adoption rate at 96%," a report by world-leading cloud services provider Akamai shows.