By Alana Grelyak

To many telecommunications professionals, the challenges presented by the market are limited to brand awareness or government regulation. It's easy to forget that there are very large swaths of the country where economic, geographic, and geopolitical realities render ordinary expansion procedures moot. However, there is seemingly boundless potential for growth in the developing world for those who would be willing to exercise a little creativity and flexibility. One such venue for expansion is Afghanistan.

The possibilities for service providers in Afghanistan are abundant. In a country of roughly 28 million people, only about 2% of the population is actually connected to the Internet. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which was the Taliban’s prohibition of Internet service that occurred in 2001 to disallow access to any sort of anti-Islamic materials. With the downfall of the Taliban, the Afghan people now find themselves with new freedoms and new choices. Currently, the Afghan government is attempting to help fill in the gaps in the telecom arena. This leaves a lot of room for startup companies to bring their own products and services to the Afghan people. One company in particular, WaselTelecom, is setting itself up to capture a major portion of the telecommunications market in Afghanistan by offering up-to-date services, along with promoting Internet self-care services, making WaselTelecom, in all likelihood, the first Afghan telecom operator to do so.

media at high speeds. Currently, Afghanistan has four GSM-based companies and only one national fixed and CDMA network operator, Afghan Telecom.

How is WaselTelecom planning to manage such a major endeavor? In this case, they are turning to CBOSS, a transnational corporation active in 36 countries on 5 continents, as the single supplier of the entire IT infrastructure, as well as to Samsung for their switching hardware. The preliminary testing of the CBOSS products for compatibility with the

WaselTelecom is a start-up service provider, headquartered in Mazari Sharif, Balkh province, that is licensed to provide CDMA 2000 1x communications services. It’ll be providing those services to 22 of Afghanistan’s northern districts during the first phase of deployment. CDMA will allow WaselTelecom to provide high speed Internet access at a higher data rate than the widely used GSM wireless technology. As there is very little hard-wired infrastructure in Afghanistan to provide Internet related services, CDMA will allow a large base of the population to access the Internet wirelessly and experience different

Samsung hardware has been successfully completed, and within a short period of time due to the flexibility of the CBOSS industrial solution and its open architecture. Being that CBOSS is the sole provider of WaselTelecom’s

IT infrastructure, a wide range of CBOSS’s products are being utilized. For instance, Wasel is planning to become a leader of the mobile Internet segment, offering customer EVDO-based high-speed data services enabled

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