Trans-Caspian corridor, part 4: the transit market the cable enters, and its prices

Part 3 of this series found that the launch documents for the Trans-Caspian fibre line give no price, no lit capacity and no terms for buyers outside its two shareholders. Part 4 looks at the market the line is entering: who buys transit across the corridor today, in what volumes, and where prices are and are not published.

What Kazakhstan's main carrier sells

The clearest public record of the transit trade is Kazakhtelecom's 2024 annual report. Its corporate business division approved a new version of its Corporate Segment Price List that year, which the company says "enabled the creation of more competitive conditions in the international telecommunications services market", according to the report's corporate business section. The report does not reproduce the list.

It does list the year's international deals. Kazakhtelecom concluded contracts for 6x100 Gbit/s of transit channels on the China to Europe route with China Mobile International (UK), China Unicom Global and China Telecommunications Corporation, organised 2x100 Gbit/s on the Europe to Uzbekistan route for Uzbektelecom and 1x100 Gbit/s on the Europe to Kyrgyzstan route for Kyrgyztelecom, and signed a memorandum with China Telecommunications Corporation to expand transit interconnection by 7x100 Gbit/s on the China to Europe route for 2025 to 2027, the same section says. The network section adds 6x100 Gbit/s of transit channels on the China to Russia route with 1+1 redundancy, and lists participation in the Caspian seabed line and expansion of China to Europe transit among the plans for 2025, according to the network report.

Added together, the channels organised or contracted in 2024 come to 15 waves of 100 Gbit/s, or 1.5 Tbit/s, before the memorandum, a Corridor Signal sum from the report. The report gives revenue only for the corporate segment as a whole, KZT 139.2 billion in 2024, which also covers telephony, data, internet and satellite services for businesses and the state, so the value of the transit contracts cannot be derived from it.

Scale against the new line

Set against those volumes, the Caspian line is large. The Azerbaijani presidency gives its capacity as more than 400 terabits per second (presidency), a design figure. Kazakhstan's digital minister has said it will add up to 6 Tbit/s, The Times of Central Asia reported, four times the transit channels Kazakhtelecom set up in 2024 on the Data Desk's sum. The documents reviewed do not say whether that 6 Tbit/s is lit on day one or how much of it the two shareholders keep for their own networks.

The incumbent route is overland to the north. Russian operators have been the principal suppliers of Kazakhstan's international bandwidth, according to a 2025 Internet Society report cited by The Times of Central Asia. A buyer's price for the Caspian path will therefore be set against what those routes cost, and none of the documents reviewed publishes that either.

Where prices are published

In the corridor, wholesale prices appear in public documents mainly where a government sets them. The protocol Türkiye approved on 15 October for a fibre network in northern Cyprus caps the wholesale price of unlimited fibre-to-the-home service at $18 per subscriber per month for packages of up to 100 Mbit/s, adds $5 for each further 100 Mbit/s, sets connection charges at $50 and indexes the caps to consumer prices every six months, according to the text in Türkiye's Official Gazette. That is an access price on a state-backed network, not a transit price, but it shows the form a published tariff takes.

The Caspian crossing sits at the other end of that range: a commercial asset owned by a joint venture of two operators and built without budget money, according to the Kazakh government. Its prices will be set in contracts like those in Kazakhtelecom's report, and the 2024 list shows who the obvious first buyers are: Chinese carriers sending traffic to Europe, and the state operators of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. None of the documents reviewed says whether any of them has been offered capacity on the new line. Part 5 looks at the rules that govern transit, and at who regulates the price of capacity in each country.