Trans-Caspian corridor, part 5: the rules on the seabed and on each shore

The last part of this series asks who decides whether a cable can cross the Caspian, and who, if anyone, regulates the price of capacity on it and on the links at each end. The answer in the documents reviewed is that the seabed has a treaty, the shores have national regulators, and no regulator has claimed the crossing itself.

The seabed

Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan, the five littoral states, signed the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea on 12 August 2018. Its Article 14 provides that they "may lay submarine cables and pipelines on the bed of the Caspian Sea", according to a University of Tehran paper that quotes the text, and law firm Norton Rose Fulbright read Article 14(3) as requiring agreement on a pipeline route only between the countries it crosses, in a note published in September 2018. Both documents describe the Convention as not yet in force when they were written. Corridor Signal could not obtain the official text, and the documents reviewed do not establish the Convention's status in 2026.

The Kazakh and Azerbaijani governments did sign an instrument on the day of the launch. During the ceremony on 15 October they exchanged a signed agreement on cooperation to develop the Trans-Caspian International Transport Corridor, according to the Kazakh presidency, which attributes construction of the line to Kazakhtelecom and AzerTelecom and does not say the cable was built under that agreement. The line was paid for from the operators' own funds, and their joint venture is responsible for building and operating it, according to the Kazakh government. None of the launch documents places the joint venture's prices or access terms under a regulator.

On each shore

Kazakhstan. Kazakhtelecom acts as the country's long-distance and international communications operator, with the right to settle accounts with foreign administrations under ITU regulations, according to the regulatory section of its 2024 annual report. It is included in the State Register of Natural Monopolies, and its antimonopoly regulation is overseen by the Committee for State Control in the Sphere of Communications, according to the report's competition section. The report records 2024 changes that brought maximum tariffs for leasing sites for communication equipment, and poles for fibre lines, under state regulation. It does not say whether international transit is among the services whose prices are regulated. Foreign networks have been admitted on stated conditions: Starlink committed in June 2025 to comply fully with national law on information security and communications, according to a ministry statement.

Azerbaijan. President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree establishing a Digital Connectivity information system, owned by the Ministry of Digital Development and Transport and operated by the Information and Communication Technologies Agency, to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and transparency of regulation and oversight in the sector, including telecommunications, Report.az reported on 15 October. The report gives no decree number, and the documents reviewed set out no terms for selling transit capacity.

Georgia. The transit leg west of the Caspian has the most active regulator. The Communications Commission has launched studies of two wholesale markets, "IP transit, i.e. global and local internet connectivity" and dedicated backhaul channels between settlements, as part of a holistic review of competition, according to a ComCom statement of 22 September. The same review found, on preliminary results, that one operator owns about 70 per cent of the potentially usable duct infrastructure, and experts recommended transparency, non-discrimination and stronger tools to regulate access fees. The statement gives no timetable for the transit study.

Türkiye. Where Türkiye has set terms on the corridor's edge, it has published them: the northern Cyprus fibre protocol writes maximum wholesale tariffs into its text, has the local regulator, BTHK, set the caps with regard to inflation and costs, and indexes them to consumer prices every six months, according to the Official Gazette.

What the series leaves open

Across five parts the documents establish a route, two coastal ends, an owner and a design capacity. They do not establish the landing stations, the backhaul west of Sumgayit, the lit capacity, the price or the regulator for the crossing. Three items would close the largest gaps: the Convention's status, ComCom's findings on IP transit, and any published terms from the joint venture. The Corridor Capacity Tracker will record them as they appear.