Azerbaijan, Baku, 14 April / corr. Trend S. Babayeva/ The introduction of 3G services can lead to the reduction in the mobile communication tariffs, said Ali Abbasov, the minister of Communication and IT of Azerbaijan.
"The mobile operators of Azerbaijan are going to introduce 3G technology," the minister said.
According to minister, the mobile communication tariffs depend on the market and can not be regulated by the Ministry. "We want to keep the market active and reduce tariffs for the resources used by the operators. But we are not able to regulate the tariffs for the end users," said Abbasov.
There are 4 mobile operators in Azerbaijan. Three of them, Azercell Telecom, Bakcell and Azerfon are operating on GSM standard and only one of them, Catel - on CDMA standard. There are over 4mln mobile communcation users in Azerbaijan.
3G was developed by the International Electron Communication Union and is known as the International Mobile Telecommunications 2000. 3G is a set of services which unite high-speed mobile network with the Internet and radio. It enables the video-telephonic communication, watching films and TV programs on mobile phone, etc.
There are 2 types of 3G standards worldwide: UMTS (or W-CDMA) and CDMA2000. UMTS is mainly spread in Europe, CDMA2000 - in Asia and the United States. According to Wireless Intelligence, at the end of November 2006, there were over 364mln 3G subscribers in the world, including 93.5mln connected to UMTS network and 271.1mln to СDMA2000.