Turk Telekom Developed Virtual Class Against Swine Flu

Turk Telekom is a company fully aligned with the national objectives that had been set by the government. And I would like to start first of all talking a little bit about improving the network and the digital divide.

In this particular area the government’s directives had been followed, practically from the early 2000 even with the launch of ADSL in 2004-2005 the government set the objective to the company not to put a service only in the major cities and frankly this was a very impressive work that was done by the management of the company to actually launch such a service throughout 81 provinces in the country with great success.

I would say that the second very important development was in relation to upgrading all the rural switches which were about 3+ million lines which project was completed around mid 2007. We are now working on access side. Potentially this would be a WiMAX but it can be other wireless technologies in the future we are not sure we are awaiting the decision of this. But this is an area where we can make some further improvement and I believe that the future should be removing the digital divide in a very practical and effective way with all these technologies available, whether they are terrestrial or satellite.

And relation to providing connectivity to schools for example. This is an area where Turkey has reached a very high percentage in comparison with other countries. One could easily see that this would be coming down to zero which will enable every single child throughout the whole country to have the right of access. And that therefore gives the right to that child to a decent education and to achieve their full potential in whatever field as the choice of that child.

On international connectivity also was one topic raised here at the company is moving a direct direction and our connectivity capacity now is weighing excess of 300 Giga. We will see that number, of course, going up again in multiples of ten as these technologies are developing and of course the utilization levels are increasing. The average utilization in Turkey today per customer across the whole base is an excess of 8 Giga today. So within ten years you can imagine that this number is going to be probably ten times that number. So that of course it means increased capacity requirements on the network and a lot more users. Within a decade this is an achievable objective.

Another important objective that Galip Zerey has mentioned was about information technology. Now the company already has acquired 4 companies in this regard and the model we are using now is basically to allow these companies first of all to preserve their identities. Second we give them the opportunity to offer services to us as a company so we are an important customer. And then we’ll help them to sell these products and services internationally. And I would like to see that maybe in ten years time perhaps the values of these companies will become a very high percentage of the value of Turk Telekom. Perhaps… Ten years is a very difficult time to judge but I think by that time maybe these companies would be more valuable than the Turk Telekom itself because they can grow across the whole globe. The focus in these products and services are Telecom related but of course we are also looking into information technology services in the finance sector, the health sector and the educational sector.

On the educational sector there are very important imperatives from the government. We have been investing in educational content.