Penetration and ISPs
The National Statistical Agency reports that 73 percent of users access the Internet by dial-up, 15 percent by means of ADSL, and 6 percent using satellite access. Over 50 percent of users accessed the Internet from home in 2008.4 Forty-two percent of families living in towns with populations of at least 70,000 people have a personal computer. KazakhTelekom (KT) reported an increase in its broadband subscriber base from 270,000 to 456,000 in 2008.5 Despite these increases, Internet usage is concentrated in urban centers, while outside those centers access remains beyond the reach of most Kazakhs.
The official language in the country is Kazakh, spoken by 64 percent of the population. Russian, spoken by 95 percent, is recognized as the official language of international communication. Russian is the most popular language used on the Internet (94.1 percent), followed by Kazakh (4.5 percent), and English (1.4 percent), a figure which may account for the high percentage of Kazakh Web sites hosted in Russia (including those on the country-code domain name “.kz”). Six percent of “.kz” domain Web sites are hosted in Kazakhstan, with the remainder hosted in Russia and elsewhere.
The cost of Internet access remains high relative to the average salary (54,500 tenge in 2008, or USD 363).7 KazakhTelecom’s tariffs for unlimited ADSL access with capacity of 128 kbit/s were USD 30. However, as a result of the ongoing liberalization in the telecommunications sector in 2007, the operators’ tariffs fell considerably. Since 2007, schools in Kazakhstan are provided with free dial-up access, which is being expanded to include broadband connections (although access is restricted to Web sites and other Internet resources within the “.kz” domain).
Read more about this topic: Kaznet