By Arife Yildiz Unal
ANKARA (AA) - Mobile internet usage in Turkey skyrocketed when advanced fourth-generation (4G) telecom services -- dubbed 4.5G in Turkey -- became available, said Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communication Minister on Wednesday.
"People whose devices or sim cards are compatible with 4.5G service use more than 5.5 gigabytes in monthly Internet use," Ahmet Arslan told Anadolu Agency about the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) report for the first quarter of 2017.
Arslan stated that Turkey had 11 million fixed phone subscribers at the end of 2016, compared to 75.7 million mobile subscribers, commenting: “In short, 94.9 percent of our population are mobile subscribers"
Arslan added that Turkey tops European countries in the duration of monthly mobile usage, as Turkey's average was 413 minutes in the first three months of 2017.
Arslan said that since becoming available last April, 4.5G services have grown more popular in Turkey.
"One year later almost 56.4 million Turkish citizens have become 4.5G service subscribers," Arslan said, adding that only 22 million people were able to use this service through the end of March since their device or sim card was not compatible with 4.5G.
Arslan said that the communication sector reaped 45.4 billion Turkish liras ($12.9 billion) in sales revenue in 2016 and 12 billion Turkish liras ($3.4 billion) in the first three months of 2017.
- High-speed fiber Internet
Arslan also said that that high-speed fiber Internet is also growing impressively.
The length of fiber infrastructure grew 9.2 percent over the last year to reach 297,620 kilometers (184,932 miles) by the end of March 2017.
Fiber subscribers in the country now exceed 2 million, he said.
Turkey’s mobile network progressed to 4.5G in April 2016, which is 10 times faster than 3G technology, said the Information and Communication Technologies Authority head.
"4.5G is 10 times faster than 3G technology," Omer Fatih Sayan said.
According to the authority, 4.5G technology offers consumers the ability to use new technologies and provides faster browsing, downloads, and uploads.