10 September 2008
Tunis — Figures recently released by the ministry of communication technologies, reveal a significant growth of cell phone and internet users in Tunisia.
The report shows that 80 Tunisians out of 100, have a cell phone. In June 2008 there were some 8 million 120,000 cell phone users in Tunisia, against 7 million for the same period in 2007.
The report also shows that efforts to address the issue of traffic saturation have been successful, with jams being reduced from 16% in 2007 to 2% in 2008.
SMS messages are also on the increase with some 80 million messages sent in 2008, as opposed to 61 million messages in 2007.
As far as the number of internet users is concerned, the number of people registered to ADSL (broadband) connections has doubled from 76,000 in 2007 to 153,000 in 2008. 27% of the users use 512 k connections, and 22,000 users have a connection equal or superior to 1 Mbits/s.
The number of companies benefiting from WIMAX connections has reached 700, end of June 2008, and the number of subscribers to data sending through VSAT, has also increased to reach 420, notably among enterprises producing software and computer systems and call centres.
End of June 2008, there were some 2 million 68,000 internet users in Tunisia, writes the report, against 1 million 618,000 in 2007, representing an evolution of 28%.
The report concludes that "the connection capacity of the passing band to the international internet network has recently been reinforced, in order to buttress the use of the internet in Tunisia". Indeed, this capacity doubled in 2008 to reach 5,1 Gbits/s against 2,4 Gbits/s during the same period in 2007.
There are two mobile phone operators in Tunisia, one is public (Tunisie Telecom) and the other is private (Tunisiana).
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