Kazakhstan overtakes Russia as mobile Internet user

According to the results of the study, the first place went to Armenia, where mobile internet penetration is 68%, the third - Russia (63%). Kazakhstan's figure as for the year-end was 67%. An outsider to penetrate mobile Internet became Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan - 35 percent, 33 percent and 21 percent, respectively. Low penetration of these services in the above mentioned countries is associated with high tariffs for mobile data traffic and low penetration of smartphones - only 13-14 percent of the population. As for networks of "fourth generation" (4G/LTE), in the beginning of May 2014 the LTE network was launched in all the CIS surveyed, except for Belarus. 3G network has been launched on the whole territory of the CIS. Russia became the leader in penetration of mobile Internet users on 4G technology (1.4 percent of the population). As of April 2014 there were more than 2 million LTE-connections in more than 50 regions of the country. In Kazakhstan, the LTE-network launched by the national operator "Kazakhtelecom" (subsidiary of "Altel" JSC) at the end of 2012 in the largest cities - Astana and Almaty, and later - in satellite cities of Almaty and in more than 30 settlements of Almaty region. By the end of the last year 4G network coverage includes six cities. Number of connections on LTE as of May 2014 amounted to 200,000. The three leaders on the penetration of new technologies include Russia, Moldova and Armenia. In the Russian Federation in February 2014 within the Garden Ring of Moscow launched the most high-speed network in the world LTE-Advanced Cat6, which provides peak download speeds of up to 300 megabits per second. Currently, this technology is supported by a stationary subscriber WiFi-router. Smartphones holding this technology are expected to be at the market by the yearend.