Azerbaijan's internet market: Focus on speed and accessibility Caliber.Az review

By the end of last year, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Digital Development and Transport (MDDT) completed the rollout of fixed broadband internet coverage across the entire country. In 2024, Azerbaijan climbed eight positions in the Mobile Connectivity Index. According to the recently published data from the Speedtest Global Index, as of May this year, Azerbaijan ranked 87th out of 153 countries in terms of average fixed broadband speed, which has doubled to 79.25 Mbps. As a result, high-speed internet is now accessible not only to residents of Baku and major cities, but also to users in peripheral regions.

In recent years, Azerbaijan has taken a number of steps to accelerate its digital development, with a key focus on speeding up the construction of necessary network infrastructure across the entire country. Large-scale efforts to build fibre-optic networks in the capital and regions have been underway for quite some time, but it was only in recent years that the country managed to fast-track the Fiber to the Home (FTTH) programme—laying fibre-optic lines directly to consumers’ apartments.

In the first stage, broadband services became available to residents of Baku, Sumgayit, Ganja, Khirdalan, Shirvan, and Mingachevir. High-speed networks based on optical technologies, including GPON (Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Networks), are being actively implemented in these areas, providing most users in the capital and major cities with speeds ranging from 30 to 100 Mbps.

The next phase of the programme focused on expanding fibre-optic coverage to other cities and administrative centres of the republic. Efforts have also been intensified in the territories liberated from occupation, including Shusha, Khankendi, Khojaly, and others.

This work was far from easy, as even four to five years ago, around 70% of households in small towns, rural areas of the country, and even in some settlements on the Absheron Peninsula were still connected to the internet via outdated ADSL technology using copper telephone lines from local exchanges. The average connection speed in these areas was just 4–5 Mbps — quite limited given modern-day demands.

Due to the lag in regional network infrastructure, by the end of 2022, fibre-optic internet access was available to less than one-third of users in Azerbaijan’s regions.

To address these disparities, the MDDT implemented a series of programmes aimed at strengthening cooperation between state-owned backbone providers and private internet service providers and cable operators, with the goal of involving them in the development of network infrastructure in the regions.

However, the main responsibility for expanding broadband access in the regions fell on the state-owned backbone operators Aztelekom and Baktelecom, which invested significant resources in laying regional fibre-optic lines, including in some of the most remote villages.

As a result of these efforts, Azerbaijan now has 2.2 million fixed broadband internet subscribers, of whom 1.7 million — or 78% — are using GPON (Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network) technology, which allows for internet speeds of up to 1 Gbps. Overall, broadband internet access is currently available to 2.9 million households across the country.

“When we launched the Online Azerbaijan project, the average internet speed in the country was around 12 Mbps. By the end of 2024, the average speed may exceed 80 Mbps,” said Minister of Digital Development and Transport Rashad Nabiyev during the INMerge Innovation Summit held in October last year.

The significant progress in improving broadband internet speeds in Azerbaijan is also confirmed by data from the global rankings service Speedtest Global Index. For comparison, in November 2023, Azerbaijan ranked 116th out of 181 countries worldwide in terms of fixed broadband speed, with an average download speed of 33.03 Mbps. At that time, Baku held a relatively low 137th position in the global ranking for fixed broadband speed.

However, within a relatively short period, the situation has changed markedly. According to the Speedtest Global Index report for May 2025, Azerbaijan rose to 87th place out of 153 countries, with a fixed broadband speed of 79.25 Mbps. This means the country’s average fixed broadband speed has more than doubled compared to the previous year’s figure of 39.48 Mbps.

During the same reporting period, Baku ranked 115th among 196 cities globally in terms of average fixed broadband speed, and an impressive 84th among 148 cities in terms of mobile internet speed.

During a recent meeting between Minister of Digital Development and Transport Rashad Nabiyev and Ookla President and CEO Stephen Bye, it was also noted that the average fixed broadband speed in Azerbaijan has doubled over the past year — a trend confirmed by objective assessments from international industry ranking services.

Undoubtedly, Azerbaijan still has a long way to go to catch up with global leaders such as Singapore, which tops the world ranking for broadband speed with 372.02 Mbps, or the French city of Lyon, which leads the ranking of major cities with a fixed broadband speed of 349.44 Mbps.

Nevertheless, among the countries of Central Asia and the South Caucasus, Azerbaijan is the undisputed leader in broadband speed — a fact confirmed by global ranking statistics. As of early 2025, the average fixed broadband speed in Kazakhstan stood at 71.97 Mbps, in Uzbekistan at 66.77 Mbps, in Kyrgyzstan at 65.44 Mbps, in Armenia at 58.5 Mbps, in Georgia at 42.07 Mbps, and in Tajikistan at 30.66 Mbps. Turkmenistan lagged significantly behind, with an average speed of just 4 Mbps.

In addition to improvements in speed, Azerbaijan has also shown strong results in the quality of its optical network infrastructure and its relative accessibility for the population — a trend confirmed by assessments from international organisations and global tech vendors.

“The numbers show that fixed-line internet speed in Azerbaijan has doubled since last year, and the country’s ranking has risen by roughly 30 positions,” said Cao Yu, Head of Networking at Huawei for the Middle East and Central Asia, during a project review event for Online Azerbaijan in March this year. “Azerbaijan has built one of the best systems in the region for deploying fibre-optic infrastructure using GPON technology, achieving 100% coverage.”

According to Natalia Mochu, Regional Director of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 88.2% of young people aged 15 to 24 in Azerbaijan use broadband internet — a figure notably higher than the global average of 79%.

“In low-income countries, the cost of fixed broadband can amount to nearly one-third of the average monthly income,” she noted. “But your country demonstrates much more favourable figures. In Azerbaijan, the cost of a basic mobile data package represents just 1.14% of per capita Gross National Income (GNI), and fixed broadband services amount to 1.34%. For comparison, the UN’s recommended affordability threshold is 2% of GNI — and Azerbaijan is well below that level, making internet access far more affordable.”

The progress made in building high-speed networks and ensuring their accessibility in Azerbaijan is certainly encouraging. However, there is still much work to be done, and complacency would be premature. Several long-standing issues in the local internet market remain unresolved. Many private providers fail to upgrade their network equipment in a timely manner or expand bandwidth capacity, yet continue to attract new subscribers. This leads to oversaturated networks, resulting in slower speeds, frequent disconnections, and other technical disruptions.

Similar technical issues are not uncommon among state-owned providers either. As a result, users suffer, and the actual internet speeds—especially during peak hours—often fall short of those advertised in paid service packages. Such a situation was observed in Baku last year, following the increase in minimum internet speeds to 100 Mbps. Despite this upgrade, actual performance frequently lagged behind the promised speeds, even as monthly tariffs rose from 18 ($10.6) to 25 manats ($14.7).

In the near future, internet operators and providers face the challenge of offering high-speed packages that will bring Azerbaijan’s internet speeds up to the level of developed countries.

“Updated infrastructure, customer experience, latent demand, and other studies indicate that to reach internet speeds comparable to developed nations, local operators and providers need to offer packages with speeds exceeding 150–200 Mbps. To achieve this, the telecommunications infrastructure must support internet speeds of 1 Gbps and above and be capable of delivering high-speed packages,” said Nail Mardanov, Chairman of the Information and Communication Technologies Agency, during a meeting with internet market stakeholders held in May.