Connectivity Providers Database

Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 01:37:34 GMT From: Zita Wenzel <zita@ISI.EDU> To: sghuter@nsrc.org, mlizarza@darkwing.uoregon.edu Cc: zita@nsrc.org, randy@nsrc.org Subject: .ge Update Message-Id: <200201100137.BAA02987@gin.isi.edu> Republic of Georgia (.ge): There are more than ten ISPs operating in the Georgian market. Most of them are providing services in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Four ISPs have a regional appearance and one provides services only in the Batumi region. All Georgian ISPs are receiving connectivity via satellites connecting them to ISPs in USA, Europe, and Russia. However, a few of them also have fiber optic connections to the Internet through Russia; these channels are mostly used for IP telephony. Total bandwidth is constantly increasing and today (01/02) it is about 25-30 Mbps. The largest ISPs have 5-7 Mbps link connectivity. Connectivity to major Georgian ISPs by international Internet companies includes UUNet (US), Netsat Express (US), SMS-Internet (UK), QPNQwest (NL), DeTeSat (DE) and Rostelecom (Ru). The standard services provided by ISPs are: Internet connectivity via dial-up and leased lines, e-mail, and web hosting. These are the major ISPs in Georgia: 1. Sanet <http://www.sanet.ge>, George Kashia <kisho@sanet.ge> 2. Georgia online <http://www.online.ge>, Merab Buzaladze 3. Caucasus Network <http://www.caucasus.net>, Mamia Sanadiradze <mamia@caucasus.net> Several problems exist in the IT development in Georgia: 1. The main problem is the difficult economic situation in the country, where salaries of the majority of the population do not allow them to buy computers and have access to Internet. 2. There is a low awareness in the population of how to use the Internet; this concerns individuals as well as managers of organizations especially in the state sector. 3. Legislation laws in the country do not really support creation of a competitive environment for the development of the telecommunications infrastructure. Assistance by International Organizations is highly welcome in this field. 4. There is a very high price for the existing Trans-Asia-Europe fiber optic channel, because of the monopoly of companies owning these channels in the countries. Local telecommunication systems in cities are in bad condition, although some progress in recent years has been made. 5. Internet resources in the national language (Georgian, with Georgian script) are very limited; this restricts the interest and use of Internet users with poor knowledge of foreign languages. The majority of Internet sites in the country are prepared in English, since the aim of the creators is to introduce their companies to the world. More progress with the use of national languages is expected if international software companies start supporting Unicode as an international standard of encoding of characters, however interest of these companies is restricted due to the limited number of users. 6. There is a relatively low level of education in telecommunications and computer networking for professionals working in this field. Universities and high schools can not provide high quality software and hardware engineers. The organization of training and workshops with the participation of high level western experts would be useful.