The business, in which Telia Company has a 61.9% stake, wants to compare alternative providers with the current service it receives from Kazakhtelecom, according to CEO Arti Ots.
“There three nationwide networks, including Kazakhtelecom,” Ots told Capacity in an interview this week. The others are Veon’s Beeline, which already has a mobile network sharing deal with Kcell, and Transtelecom, part-owned by the country’s rail network – it is unrelated to Russia’s Transtelecom, which has a similar heritage.
“We could also build a fibre network ourselves, but that’s unreasonable because there are already three nationwide fibre networks,” said Ots. His preference is for Kcell to lease fibre provided by one of the three networks.
Kcell, whose shares are quoted on stock exchanges in Kazakhstan and the UK, wants a new fibre deal because of the rapid growth in data, said Ots, who has been CEO since early 2015.
“Data is growing exponentially and our own fibre network is the only way to carry this traffic. Without our own, we would get into a situation where we didn’t have enough capacity. There might be a bottleneck. Our own network would give us flexibility.”
Kcell sees data volumes tripling in three years from existing customers, and it is adding new 4G customers, “so if you add the new customers it will go up six times. Netflix and YouTube are using the highest capacity.”
Telia is trying to sell its stake in Kcell as it is unravelling its central Asian investments, but it has made no announcement so far.
