Afghanistan's government has announced plans to start spending the income from a Telecom Development Fund (TDF) which will be used to expand mobile and landline services into underserved rural areas.
According to the licenses issued to the current GSM operators, they should pay 2.5% from their net revenues to this fund to facilitate the communications services to remote and under services districts of the country, said Eng. Barialai Hassam Deputy Minister Technical in a news conference.
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The mentioned money should be paid by the operators to this fund quarterly and at the moment, the fund has nearly US$26 million available to it.
Afghanistan Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (ATRA) is the only Governmental Administration that regulates the telecom services in the country and also manages the procedure of expending the Telecom Development Fund (TDF) to extend the telecom services to rural areas.
Deputy Minister Technical added that by starting this project four four districts of the five rural provinces will be decorated by telecom services including Badakhshan, Paktika, Zabul, Daikundi, and Nooristan and it is estimated that totally 400,000 people will get benefit of this project.
According to ATRA, these are still more districts where telecom services have not been facilitated by any operators and the same projects will be announced in near future for these rural areas.
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Source: Cellular News.