Uzbekistan

About connectivity in Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan uses 220V/50Hz with Type C and Type F outlets, consistent with European/post-Soviet norms. The phone jack is RJ-11. Uzbektelecom, the post-1991 successor to the Soviet-era Uzbek SSR PTT operations, remains majority state-controlled. The mobile market is dominated by UZMOBILE (Uzbektelecom's subsidiary), Beeline Uzbekistan (Veon), Ucell (Coscom, now Uzbek state-controlled after multiple ownership changes), and Mobiuz.

Uzbekistan's academic Internet connectivity began through limited research-network gateways in the mid-1990s. Commercial dial-up emerged through 1995-1997 with Uzbektelecom's service plus private operators including Sarkor Telecom, Buzton, Uznet, and a small number of regional ISPs. Per-minute metered dial-up through Uzbektelecom PSTN at state-controlled prices kept Uzbek Internet penetration low through the late 1990s and 2000s. International bandwidth was historically routed primarily through Russia, with Internet content subject to extensive filtering through the Karimov-era (1991-2016) information-control framework. Post-2016 liberalization under President Mirziyoyev modestly opened the Uzbek Internet environment, with mobile data and 4G LTE driving most recent connectivity growth.

Uzbektelecom introduced cardphone units in the 1990s with chip-card cardphones becoming standard. The Uzbek prepaid international calling-card market through the 2000s and 2010s was substantial in absolute volume because of the very large Uzbek outbound labor migration — an estimated 2-3 million Uzbeks work in Russia (the largest single destination by far, particularly in construction, retail, and service sectors), Kazakhstan, South Korea, Turkey, and increasingly the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The country's small Korean (Koryo-saram, a Soviet-deportation-era community) and ethnic-Russian populations sustained additional outbound card volume.

Tempest Telecom served Uzbekistan through dial-up POPs in Tashkent. Iridium satphones served the energy sector (the substantial natural gas and gold-mining operations across the Kyzylkum desert), archaeological-research customer base (the Silk Road heritage sites of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva), and NGO operators working the Fergana Valley humanitarian customer base.

Modern Uzbekistan has expanding 4G LTE coverage with 5G rollout beginning in Tashkent. FTTH is concentrated in the capital and regional centers; rural coverage relies on mobile-data infrastructure.

Tempest's services across Uzbekistan, 1997–2012

Tempest Telecommunications operated international connectivity services in Uzbekistan between 1997 and 2012 under a unified prepaid account that absorbed multiple service types onto a single customer credential. Customers in Uzbekistan drew from the same balance for pre-paid international voice calling, RADIUS-authenticated dial-up Internet roaming, metered Wi-Fi hotspot access, Iridium and Thuraya satellite voice, and Inmarsat BGAN and Thuraya data terminals. An attempted kiosk-payment federation (PATN, 1998) extended the same architecture to public Internet terminals but failed to reach scale.

Both Iridium (global LEO) and Thuraya (regional GEO) satellite voice were available in Uzbekistan from approximately 2001, alongside global BGAN data from late 2005.

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