ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq reduced internet transit capacity fees by 40 percent on Friday as part of an ongoing overhaul by the communications ministry to improve internet speeds and reduce prices.
"As part of our strategy to transform Iraq into a pivotal international corridor for internet transit between East and West, we have directed a 40% reduction in transit capacity fees,” Iraq’s Communications Minister, Mustafa Sanad announced in a Facebook post. “This motion has been officially approved by the Opinion Board and the Board of Directors of the General Company for Telecommunications and Informatics.”
Iraq serves as a strategic transit corridor between the Gulf states and Europe. In the southernmost province of Basra, the underwater Gulf Bridge International Cable System connects to Al-Faw port, linking the region by land to the rest of Europe.
Sanad noted that after enacting the reduction in transit fees, Iraq received “official offers from two Gulf countries to connect and route their digital capacities to Europe by way of Iraqi infrastructure,” adding that the final contracts will be “signed in the coming days."
In late May, Sanad announced the launch of a government operation in mid-July to dismantle illegal, untaxed internet networks currently serving more than 1.5 million unregistered subscribers.
“The number of social media accounts in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region has surpassed 40.1 million in the first half of this year, compared to 34.3 million during the same period last year,” Muhannad al-Samawi, general supervisor at the Baghdad-based Digital Media Center (DMC) a digital monitoring non-profit, told Rudaw on Wednesday.
According to the Global Connectivity Index (GCI) ranking real-time internet connectivity data speeds for 216 countries, Iraq comes in at 157.
