Kazakhstan is among post-Soviet leaders in 4G penetration

Mobile Internet in Kazakhstan has proved to be more popular than in Russia and most of the post-Soviet states, Tengrinews reports citing Lenta.ru.

Analysts of J’son & Partners Consulting studied mobile Internet penetration in the post soviet space. They calculated it as the ratio of active connections to population. Armenia is the leader with 68 percent. Kazakhstan is in the second place with 67 percent. The next country is Russia, where 63 percent of the population use mobile Internet.

Countries with the lowest penetration are Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Only a third of their populations go online using mobile devices. Analysts attribute this to high costs of internet traffic and relatively small popularity of smart phones.

In terms of penetration of 4G technologies, Russia is the leader: more than two million people regularly use the service. In Kazakhstan, the figure stands at 200 thousand people. 4G/LTE network is in place in all the countries participating in the rating except Belarus.

Mobile Internet in Kazakhstan is relatively fast - 4.5 megabits per second on average - according to the survey of Netindex.com. However, on the global scale, this average put in into 62nd place out of 107 countries. New Zealand is the leader of the mobile internet speed rating what an average of 21.8 megabits per second.

Writing by Dinara Urazova, editing by Tatyana Kuzmina