Research Information System
2ND ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOCIAL SCIENCES AICSS 2016, İstanbul, Turkey, 02 June 2016, pp.100
Penetration and condition of the broadband internet services have become the essential indicator of a nation’s telecommunications infrastructure development. However, the broadband segment of the Turkish telecommunications policies emerged relatively lately. This delay was a consequence of a series of administrative and political factors which also set the stage for possible future problems. The paper hereof analyzes the broadband related facet of policy background since the public investments in the 1980s, early privatization attempts in the 1990s, and the total privatization in the 2000s. The author highlights the political factor as the first source of the poor situation of broadband development. Political leaders and governments played the role of deus ex machina in the crisis years of the sector between 2000-2005 and solved main problems which the nascent regulatory bodies were not able to. However, that became the problem itself in the following period, when the institutional nodes have been in effort to update the telecommunications network with 3G and 4G licenses, but the arbitrary decision making has been persistent. Another factor that structurally undermined the broadband development was relatively low penetration of the fixed telephone network, which was neglected by income generation focused policies of the post-1994 period.
Keywords: telecommunications policy, broadband, Turkey.