Azertelecom LLC CEO Fuad Allahverdiyev gave an interview to the Report within the 50th World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
- You will act as an expert at the Caspian Week forum held within the forum. Could you please tell us about the topic you will cover in your speech?
Tomorrow there will also be a presentation of a project implemented by AzerTelecom within the framework of Caspian Week. The goal of the project is to turn Azerbaijan from a transit route into an Internet connection hub between Europe and Asia. One of the major projects for this purpose is the Trans Caspian Fiber Optic (TCFO) Cable Project. This project is of particular importance. As you know, Azerbaijan has always been central to the Silk Road between Europe and Asia. In modern times as well, Azerbaijan will provide Internet transit routes between Asia and Europe through these infrastructure projects, and one of the most critical projects here is the construction of a fiber-optic cable along the bottom of the Caspian Sea.
The fiber-optic cable, which runs along the bottom of the Caspian Sea between Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, will connect Asia and Europe. The goal here is to cross the internet transit routes of China and the countries around China to Azerbaijan. One of these routes is currently passing through Russia with a length of about 11 thousand km. The second direction is the connection from China to the South over the ocean. These links are connected to various Data Centers located in the European Union and provide access to the Internet because these data centers are found mainly in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Sofia, and other cities. The length of the route from Azerbaijan is planned to be 9,000 km. The new course will be the shortest, most profitable, and the least delayed.
The second direction we are planning is the Azerbaijan-Turkmenistan route. The main goal here is to meet the demand of India and the surrounding countries in the future as transit through Azerbaijan.
Design work in this direction is in progress. At the next event, we will talk about the nature of the Trans-Caspian Fiber-Optical Cable Project and the direct and indirect contributions that these infrastructure projects will make to both Azerbaijan and surrounding regions in the future because we live in the 4th Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) today. The 4th Industrial Revolution is one of the topics widely discussed today at the Davos Forum because the efficiency and effectiveness of the new economy are, of course, dependent on the development of digital solutions in the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Infrastructure projects play a vital role in this regard, and the implementation of our project will benefit the economy of Azerbaijan and the prosperity of other countries in the surrounding region.
In the next phase, our goal is to provide data centers in Azerbaijan in the future with the construction of these infrastructure projects, and the location of big companies - content providers, data centers of companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, and others. Moreover, it makes Azerbaijan no longer a transit country but a country that exports internet traffic.
All of this was implemented within the Azerbaijan Digital Hub program, which aims to make Azerbaijan the key digital hub of the region.