Iran’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technology has issued a new report on Iran’s Internet infrastructure.
According to the report, currently 31 million Iranians are connected online, of which 22 million are connected via mobile Internet services and the rest use traditional ADSL services, reported Mehr News Agency.
This indicates a 26% increase in the number of Iranians who have access to high-speed Internet compared to last Iranian year (ended March 20).
Iran’s communications network has been studied in several areas, including number of landline connections sold, landline phone penetration rate, sold and active SIM cards, mobile phone penetration rate, public telephones, villages with access to telecommunications network and ADSL and mobile Internet service subscribers.
Iran has 30.3 million landline phone subscribers. About 150.5 million SIMs have been sold and 77.5 million of them are active. This places Iran ahead of Italy and the UK at 14th place in terms of mobile phones in use.
The ministry also announced that 48,000 villages have landline phones and the landline phone penetration rate is 38.13%. This is while landline phone penetration rate in Germany and France is 91.5% and 95% respectively.
In a meeting with directors of the ministry’s provincial branches, Iran’s Deputy Minister of Communications and Information Technology Morteza Barari said the ministry is monitoring the ICT sector closely and said Iran’s ICT sector is expanding rapidly, therefore the telecom infrastructure should be expanded to keep pace with the market demand.
Barari market value is one of the main indicators in studying the growth of the sector and said, “In the sixth five-year development plan (2016-21), Iran’s ICT market has been predicted to grow by 200%.”
In the last decade, e-commerce has been one of the hot issues in this sector. Since the late 1990s, e-commerce has expanded globally and in the last few years, with the abrupt rise in Internet penetration rate in Iran, e-commerce has been growing accordingly. Although some citizens are still wary of buying goods via the Internet, the sector registered a 60% growth last year, according to the ministry.
With more than 20,000 online shops active in Tehran, shopping online has become trendy in all major cities and value of the goods purchased via Internet reached $17.4 billion in 2015.
Considering the $1,471 billion share of e-commerce in the international economy, Iran still has a long way to go.
