The Infrastructure Story: Catching Up After 2014<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
For most of the 2000s, the digital divide between Bishkek and Osh was a physical-infrastructure problem. Kyrgyzstan is a mountainous country \u2014 over 90% of its territory is highland \u2014 and the 970-kilometre fibre route from Bishkek to Osh was an expensive piece of telecommunications construction that did not look commercially viable until the price of optical fibre dropped sufficiently in the early 2010s. Kyrgyztelecom and Elcat completed and launched the backbone in 2014. Until then, Osh had been served by digital radio-relay stations whose throughput was a small fraction of what the fibre line eventually delivered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By Q3 2018, the oblast had 1,861.08 kilometres of fibre-optic line in operation. Four backbone ISPs \u2014 Kyrgyztelecom, Elcat, Megacom, and Aknet \u2014 provided the regional connectivity. Last-mile providers in Osh city included Kyrgyztelecom, Aknet, Unilink, Homeline, Ipswich, and Neotelecom; in Uzgen and Karasuu, ADSL service from Jet and Kyrgyztelecom and Wi-MAX from Maxlink covered most of the demand. In September 2019, a new provider, Nookat-Internet, launched in partnership with Skynet to extend coverage into the Nookat district. The pattern across the oblast was that the trunk infrastructure had largely arrived; what remained was the patchwork of local distribution into smaller towns and rural areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The internet exchange point story tells the second half of the connectivity divide. Bishkek has had a working IXP since 2003, enabling local peering between ISPs at speeds of up to 100 Mbps \u2014 which meant that from the early 2000s, traffic between Bishkek internet providers was exchanged locally rather than routing through international links. That local peering infrastructure was one of the structural factors behind the burst of technology startups in Bishkek in the early 2000s: fast, cheap connectivity between companies and their users gave early digital businesses a foundation that simply did not exist in the south. Osh had no IXP until 2019. Up to that point, a message sent between two Osh-based ISP customers physically routed through Bishkek and back \u2014 a 1,940-kilometre round trip for a piece of data that needed to travel a few hundred metres. The launch of an IXP in Osh in 2019 was one of the report’s headline structural recommendations becoming reality during the research period itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tariffs: The Geographic Premium and Its Removal<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Internet pricing carried a significant geographic premium for Osh users. At the point of greatest disparity, the cost per Mbps per month in Osh stood at around 1,150 soms \u2014 while the same bandwidth in Bishkek was available for 160\u2013200 soms, roughly five to seven times cheaper. Both cities were served off the same national backbone; the gap was not a function of international wholesale costs. It was a structural consequence of Bishkek’s competitive ISP market and its local IXP, which allowed providers to exchange traffic cheaply and pass the savings on, while Osh providers without a local exchange point faced higher costs routing all traffic through the capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By February 2019, that gap had been largely closed. Homeline introduced single republic-wide tariffs in January 2019, effectively ending geographic pricing discrimination for its subscribers \u2014 the structural shift the Roadmap identifies as the single most consequential positive event in regional ICT development in the period under review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mobile connectivity is one of the strongest cards Osh actually holds. Kyrgyzstan ranks among the cheapest countries globally for mobile data; Cable.co’s analysis put it in the world’s top three at $0.27 per GB. The Roadmap’s own measurements were less optimistic \u2014 averaging $0.80\u20130.90 per GB across the survey period, which still places Kyrgyzstan around 9th\u201310th globally. Megacom and Nurtelecom were offering unlimited 4G plans at 790 and 800 soms per month respectively as of August 2019. The PC penetration numbers complete the picture: 11,464 personal computers in use across enterprises and organisations in Osh oblast and 15,168 in Osh city as of 2017, against a national total of about 190,300 (2017) rising to a preliminary 203,315 by 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geographically, Osh oblast sits at one of the most important ICT-infrastructure crossroads in landlocked Central Asia. The region has multiple cross-border connections \u2014 to China at the Irkeshtam pass, two crossings to Uzbekistan at Dostuk, and several to Tajikistan. With sufficient infrastructure investment, the report argues, Osh could become a strategic route for international fibre-optic networks linking the Middle East and China to Russia and India, and could host a regional data centre offering cloud services, big-data analytics, and computational modelling for the wider Fergana Valley. The aspirational thirteenth roadmap direction \u2014 «become a regional Fergana Valley ICT hub» \u2014 is built on this geographic position. Whether the political and commercial conditions across the four-country border zone allow it to be realised is a question the report acknowledges but does not pretend to answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The roadmap proper sits in the second half of the report. It is structured as twelve operational directions, each with concrete actions and indicators, plus the thirteenth aspirational regional positioning above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most concrete near-term recommendation is direction four. The proposal is that the Osh mayor’s office, oblast administration, and local development partners create an unusually attractive package for Bishkek-based High Tech Park residents to open offices in Osh: free municipal premises wired for internet, subsidised utilities and local taxes, soft loans for fixed assets (computers, servers, office furniture), and underwritten travel and lodging for technical speakers in exchange for delivering targeted training to local audiences. The mechanism is straightforward \u2014 make it cheaper to operate a development team in Osh than in Bishkek for the first eighteen months \u2014 and addresses the human-capital problem from the demand side rather than from the supply side. Graduates do not have to migrate if the work moves to where the graduates are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the more useful sections of the report is the stakeholder map, which sets out who actually influences ICT development in the oblast and how they currently interact (or fail to). The institutional layer includes the Osh mayor’s office and oblast administration; the technology layer includes Osh Technopark itself, the four backbone ISPs, the last-mile providers, and the local IT companies; the human-capital layer includes Osh universities and technical colleges, Bishkek-based training providers running outreach in the south, and the youth-organisation layer including IT-focused NGOs; the donor layer at the time of writing was led by GIZ’s Sustainable Economic Growth programme but also included USAID, Soros, Christensen Fund, and the EU’s Central Asia programmes. The report’s diagnostic is that none of these layers were yet routinely communicating with the others, and that the absence of a single coordinating function \u2014 a role the Osh Technopark could in principle play, with sufficient organisational strengthening \u2014 was itself one of the binding constraints on the regional ICT trajectory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The acknowledgements page names the people who carried the work: Nazira Matkadyrova at GIZ for facilitating the research; Arstan Zhusupov and his team, who took on the leadership of Osh Technopark during the research period and worked through vision, mission, and operational planning with the consulting team; and Ikbol Isakov and colleagues for their cooperation in running the focus groups. The report frames itself, deliberately, as the start of a process rather than a finished plan \u2014 a baseline document the regional ICT community can argue with, refine, and actually use over the next five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Roadmap was not a desk exercise. Aziz Soltobaev and Alexandra Ishchenko made three field trips to Osh across the research period: June 10\u201312, June 24\u201325, and a final visit on August 29, 2019. Together those trips added up to roughly ten overnight stays \u2014 enough time to conduct structured interviews with ISPs, government representatives, university departments, and private sector players; to run focus groups with the local IT community organised by Ikbol Isakov and his colleagues; and to work through multiple ideation sessions on the ground with the Osh Technopark team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The work with Arstan Zhusupov and the Technopark team went beyond data collection. The sessions involved building out the organisation’s mission, vision, and strategic goals from scratch \u2014 working through what the Technopark was actually for, who its stakeholders were, and what it would need to do over the next three years to function as a real hub rather than an address. That process produced two deliverables alongside the Roadmap: a full organisational diagnostic of Osh Technopark, and a detailed operating plan covering training calendars, course curricula, forum formats, and target KPIs through 2023. The operating plan projected 1,500 ICT course graduates in 2020 alone, with a three-year cumulative reach of 100,000 people through training, events, and forum activity \u2014 built up from a week-by-week programme co-designed with the Technopark team during the field visits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The knowledge-sharing dimension ran in both directions. The field team brought frameworks \u2014 business model canvas, stakeholder analysis, design-thinking methods, startup ecosystem benchmarks from Bishkek \u2014 and worked through them interactively with the Technopark team and local community rather than delivering finished documents. The sessions were structured around Osh-specific constraints: what a training programme looks like when most potential participants are small business owners who cannot leave work for a full day, what the demand from light-industry and food-processing employers actually looks like when you go and ask them, and what a realistic pathway from a Bishkek IT company opening a satellite office in Osh would require. The Roadmap is the published output of that process; the organisational capacity built during the visits is the less visible one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n \n
\n \n Metric<\/th>\n Bishkek<\/th>\n Osh (pre-2019)<\/th>\n Osh (2019)<\/th>\n <\/tr>\n <\/thead>\n \n Internet cost per Mbps\/month<\/td>\n 160\u2013200 KGS<\/td>\n 1,150\u20131,300 KGS<\/td>\n 160\u2013200 KGS<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n \n Internet Exchange Point (IXP)<\/td>\n Since 2003<\/td>\n None<\/td>\n Launched 2019<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n \n Local peering speed<\/td>\n Up to 100 Mbps between peers<\/td>\n N\/A \u2014 all traffic via Bishkek<\/td>\n Available from 2019<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n \n Tariff parity with Bishkek<\/td>\n \u2014<\/td>\n Not achieved<\/td>\n Achieved February 2019<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n <\/tbody>\n <\/table>\n The Cross-Border Position<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Twelve Operational Directions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Stakeholder Map and What It Says About Capacity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Field Work: Three Trips, Multiple Sessions, Hands-On Capacity Building<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nReport Details and Download<\/h3>\n\n\n\n