Baku, Azerbaijan, June 21
By Fatih Karimov - Trend:
Iran will offer fiber optic internet to users in 7 big cities by the end of the current Iranian fiscal year (March 2016), said Mohsen Baqeri-Chenari, the managing director of Iranian Net Company, which is the executor of the project.
Fiber optic internet will be launched in the cities of Karaj, Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz, Mashhad, and Qom, providing 500,000 access ports with 20 megabytes per second internet, Iran's Mehr news agency quoted Baqeri-Chenari as saying on June 21.
He added that the project is scheduled to be implemented over the course of two years.
Fiber optic internet is much faster than cable internet. Plus, it allows the user to send data over much greater distances while maintaining speed.
The latest statistics of Iran's Internet Penetration Management Portal put the number of Internet users in Iran at 40 million, indicating that the Internet penetration rate of the country stood at 53.29 percent in June 2014. About 11.07 million of the users in Iran have used GPRS connection to access the Internet over the same period.
It should be noted that several of world's most popular networks, such as Twitter and Facebook are banned in Iran, while users are still able to access them via proxies. A proxy allows bypassing 'gates' meant to block certain sites.
A survey by Iranian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports indicates that 69.3 percent of the country's young generation use proxy servers to by-pass the filters and access banned Internet websites.