საინფორმაციო სააგენტო ინტერპრესნიუსი

In an exclusive interview with InterPressNews, former US Deputy Secretary of State Matthew Bryza talked about the problems between Caucasus Online and the Communications Commission.

He referred to the draft amendments to the Law on Electronic Communications, as well as to the large regional digital project, one of the main components of which is the fiber-optic cables owned by Caucasus Online under the Black Sea.

“I think it’s a shame if Georgia doesn’t participate in this digital hub project. This is a very exciting project. That’s why I really care about this issue. The digital hub project is like a digital silk way. I was very involved in the development of East-West corridor on energy, meaning the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the south Caucasus gas pipeline which is now expanding into the EU’s Southern Corridor. These are projects I spent over 20 years of my own career working on. I believe these are in interests of Azerbaijan and Georgia, and of the US and the EU, in the way that they bring Georgia, Azerbaijan, together with NATO, via Turkey, and thent onward into the EU. So the digital hub project is the same idea, except in the digital space. The idea is to build a network of fiber optic cables, stretching from Europe - so from Frakfurt, Germany, to Shanghai, China. Caucasus Online is a central piece of that, because the initial connection between Bulgaria and Georgia is a fiber optic cable under the Black Sea that CO owns. So the idea is to acquire, or build, or lease fiber optic cables along the route from Europe, under the Black Sea, then across Georgia to Azerbaijan, then under the Caspian Sea (thanks to an agreement between Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan), and then into Central Asia. There’s nothing like this, nothing exists like this. Now, one alternative is through Russia, which can be expensive and creates concerns in some Georgian people’s minds about what might happen to their internet traffic that passes through Russia. Other alternatives are via the Red Sea, and then into the Middle East or even around South Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. But those are much longer routes; they are not always reliable; there are sometimes outages in some of the sub-sea cables. So the Digital Hub Project would be the straightest, fastest, least expensive way to get internet data from the big servers in Europe to the Caucasus and Central Asia. Beyond that, for Georgia, there’s something really big that could happen. Because there would be this highly efficient, high-speed fiber optic network going right through Tbilisi, the hope is to build large data centers in Tbilisi that would attract the content of the companies like Amazon, like Netflix, like, all the Google services, because the closer computer servers are to the consumers, the better the service. Believe it or not, when the electrons and data are passing through fiber optic cables, the longer the data has to travel, the slower the service. We think of the data as travelling at the speed of light, but the further away the data is from the consumer, the worse is the service. So, Tbilisi is located in a great place to be able to serve the Caucasus and Central Asia, and the plan is to attract significant investment into Georgia, into Tbilisi, so that all these global and US internet content providers could be basing their information in Tbilisi and using this fiber optic network. What a shame it would be if that was not possible because of the cancellation of the Caucasus Online transaction”, said Matthew Bryza.