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Internet in Turkmenistan: price, availability and restrictions



Turkmenistan is one of the most closed countries in the world. Not as closed as, say, North Korea, but close to that. An important difference is the public Internet, which a citizen of the country can connect to without any special problems. This article talks about the situation with the Internet industry in the country, about the availability of the network, the cost of connection and the restrictions imposed by officials.

When did the Internet appear in Turkmenistan?


Under Saparmurat Niyazov, the Internet was exotic. At that time, several points of connection to the global network worked in the country, but only high-ranking officials and security officials had access, rarely civilian users. There were several medium-sized Internet providers. In the early 2000s, some companies were closed, and some were merged. As a result, a state monopolist appeared - the service provider Turkmentelekom. There are also small provider companies, but all of them, in fact, are subsidiaries of Turkmentelecom and are completely subordinate to it.

After President Berdimuhamedov came to power, Internet cafes appeared in Turkmenistan and network infrastructure began to develop. The first modern Internet cafes appeared in 2007. In Turkmenistan, there is a third and fourth generation cellular network. Any resident of the country can connect to it, and therefore to the Internet. You just need to buy a SIM card and insert it into your device.

How much is the Internet and what is needed to connect?


Everything, like most other countries - the provider needs to provide a statement. Within a couple of days, a new subscriber is connected. With pricing, everything is somewhat worse. According to experts from the World Bank, the Internet in Turkmenistan is the most expensive of the countries of the former USSR. One gigabyte here costs 3.5 times more than in the Russian Federation. The cost of connection is from 2500 to 6200 in ruble terms per month. For comparison, in the metropolitan state institution, wages are about 18,113 rubles (1,000 manats), while representatives of other professions, especially in the regions, have significantly lower wages.

As mentioned above, another option for connecting to the Internet is mobile communications, 4G networks. After the 4G infrastructure just appeared, the speed was up to 70 Mbps even in the countryside. Now, when the number of subscribers has increased significantly, the speed has decreased by 10 times - up to 7 Mbps in the city. And this is 4G, with regard to 3G, then there is not even 500 Kbps.

According to the US agency Akamai Technologies, Internet access for the population in the country is 20%. One of the providers in the capital of Turkmenistan has only 15,000 users, despite the fact that the population of the city exceeds 1 million people.

The average Internet connection speed for users in the country is below 0.5 Mbps.

As for the city itself, the Ministry of Communications announced a year and a half agothat in Ashgabat, the data transfer rate between data centers on average reaches 20 Gb / s.

Mobile infrastructure is well developed - even small settlements are covered by the network. If you go beyond these villages, then there will also be a connection - the coverage is not bad. But this applies to the telephone itself, but the speed and quality of mobile Internet is not very good.



Are all services available or are they blocked?


In Turkmenistan, many well-known sites and services are blocked, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vkontakte, LiveJournal, Lenta.ru. Also messengers WhatsApp, Wechat, Viber are not available. Other sites are blocked, in most cases those where criticism of the authorities is published. However, for some reason, the MTS website of Turkmenistan, the women’s magazine Women.ru, some culinary sites, etc., have been blocked.

In October 2019, access to the Google cloud was closed, so that users lost access to such services of the company as Google Drive, Google Docs and others. Most likely, the problem is that on this service in the summer a mirror of the opposition site was posted.

The authorities are most actively struggling with blocking bypass tools, including anonymizers and VPNs. Previously, in stores selling mobile phones and service centers, users were offered to install VPN applications. The authorities took action and began to regularly fine businessmen. As a result, service centers removed this service. In addition, the government monitors sites visited by users. A visit to a prohibited resource threatens to call the authorities and write an explanatory note. In some cases, law enforcement officials may arrive on their own.

In fairness, it should be noted that several years ago the ban on torrents was removed.

And how do authorities block unwanted resources and track attempts to bypass locks?


This is the most interesting moment. As far as we know, Western companies supply equipment and tracking software. Responsible for monitoring the national network and managing the technological base of the Ministry of Security of the country.

The ministry actively cooperates with the German company Rohde & Schwarz. Companies from the UK also sell hardware and software to the country. A couple of years ago, their parliament authorized supplies to Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Brunei, Turkey, and Bahrain.

Turkmenistan needs specialists to service Internet filtering. There are not enough local specialists, and the government is resorting to foreign assistance.

According to expertsTurkmenistan buys two types of network monitoring equipment - R&S INTRA and R&S Unified Firewalls, as well as R&S PACE 2 software.

Monitoring is not conducted by the Ministry itself, but by two private telecommunications companies associated with it. The owner of one of the companies is a former employee of the state security organs of Turkmenistan. These same companies receive government contracts for the development of sites, software, and maintenance of network equipment.

The supplied software from Europe analyzes speech and uses filters for recognizing words, phrases and whole sentences. The result of the analysis is checked against the black list. When coincidental, law enforcement agencies come into action. Monitor and SMS along with instant messengers.

BlockCheck v0.0.9.8 verification example:





VPN fight


The authorities of Turkmenistan are struggling with VPN with varying success due to the popularity of the technology among Internet users who do not put up with the blocking of large foreign sites. The government uses the same equipment from a German company to filter traffic.

Additionally, attempts are being made to block mobile VPN applications. For our part, we observe the inaccessibility of some users and our mobile VPN application. Only the built-in function for working with the API through the proxy helps out.



We have several users from Turkmenistan in touch, and they periodically report any problems with the connection. One of them just suggested the creation of this article. So, even after successfully logging in to the application, not all servers have a connection. It seems that some kind of automatic VPN traffic recognition filters work. According to the same users, it is best to connect to new servers added recently.

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In January last year, the government went even further and blocked access to the Google Play store.

... the residents of Turkmenistan lost access to the Google Play store, from where users downloaded applications that allow bypassing the lock.

All these actions only increased the popularity of block bypass technologies. Over the same time period, the number of search queries related to VPNs in Turkmenistan increased by 577% .

In the future, the authorities of Turkmenistan promise to improve the state of the network infrastructure, increase the connection speed and expand the coverage area of ​​3G and 4G. But it is not clear exactly when this will happen and what will happen next with the locks.

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