Central Asia has historically played an important role in connecting the world. Comprising Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, the region is home to around 80 million people from diverse cultures, religions, languages, and economic backgrounds.
While the Caspian Sea borders some of these countries, it and the region are landlocked. This means all the region’s Internet connectivity is provided by terrestrial fiber from neighboring countries Afghanistan, China, Iran, and Russia.
Given the questionable current and future status of the Internet in three of these four countries, Central Asia has quickly become an isolated road to nowhere and an equally important bastion to uphold the merits of an open, globally connected, secure, and trustworthy Internet.
This makes understanding the current resilience of the Internet in the region more important than ever. This will allow us to measure the impact of developments surrounding this region and guide further research and resources on how best to develop the Internet within it.
To this end, the Internet Society has recently drafted a report examining the resilience profile of each country in the region, using open data sources, most of which are collated and presented in Internet Society Pulse.
