Armenia a former Soviet republic, in the mountainous Caucasus region between Asia and Europe, has relatively small population of just under 3 million. However it continues to develop an effective national telecommunications service in place, reports Research & Markets.
The telecom sector was slow to capitalise on the country's steadily improving economic conditions, but by 2018 there had been considerable improvement in both the economy and the country's telecom market.
Growth has been relatively flat in the mobile market over the past five years. Mobile subscriber growth is expected to remain fairly flat over the next five years to 2023. Mobile broadband subscribers have grown very strongly over the past five years. Strong growth is predicted over the next five years to 2023. The mobile broadband market will be driven by increasingly faster speeds offered by the mobile operators as they roll out their 4G networks and falling prices due to growing competition.
The country has three main mobile operators:
VivaCell MTS is the market leader in the country with more than 60% of mobile customers on its network. In 2017 it changed the company name from VivaCell MTS to MTS Armenia, but brand name remains.
2G and 3G coverage is at 99.8% and 98.8% of the population, respectively; with 47% of Armenia’s residents served by its 4G/LTE signal in 2017. It has the best coverage and speed, but at the most expensive prices.
Recently they have completed a large-scale mobile network modernisation program. The wide-scale project includes the upgrade of existing infrastructure to decommission outdated analogue equipment, as well as the deployment of new optical fibre networks.
UCOM (rebranded from Orange) is the smallest operator in the country, but has a still good network coverage map at the lowest prices. Their 4G/LTE has been launched in 2017 on 800, 1800 and 2600 MHz. 3G is available on 90% and 4G on 56% of population in 2017.
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The Armenian government has stated that Nokia could be the company selected to participate in a project designed to ensure the country can roll out a nationwide 5G network. The government has also approved plans to build a new data centre. The data centre is to be built via a public-private partnership. The government is to provide the premises and infrastructure, and the rest handled by a private investor.
Last month “Armenia Engineering Week” bought together about 500 participants from different countries of the world, including representatives of engineering and technology sectors from state, science and research, educational, donor organizations, start-up/accomplished engineering companies.The event demonstrated Armenia’s high-tech and engineering capacity – Armenian technologies in the testing of self-driving cars, 5G, industrial IOT, semiconductors etc
According to Bagrat Yengibaryan, head of the Enterprises Incubator Foundation:
”Armenia has a huge capacity to develop engineering technologies, which will open a new page in the development of the country’s scientific potential – starting from material engineering, electronics and solutions in robotics.”
He emphasised there are many companies in Armenia that present extraordinary engineering solutions especially regarding self-driving vehicles and Armenia has prepared interesting solutions in this area.
Hootsuite has a good summary of Armenia Digital 2019 embedded below:
