Uzbekistan's competition watchdog opens review of mobile tariff rises

Uzbekistan's Competition Committee has begun examining whether price increases announced by some mobile operators are justified, it said in a statement on its official Telegram channel on 9 October.

The committee, formally the Committee for the Development of Competition and Protection of Consumer Rights, said consumers had objected that the internet traffic included in tariff plans had been increased but a guaranteed level of service quality was not ensured, so the full allowance cannot always be used, unused traffic does not carry over to the next month and the rises are out of proportion to the extra traffic. The statement does not name the operators or give the size of the increases.

What the committee said it will do

If the review finds operator actions that are anti-competitive or discriminate against consumers' rights, an inspection will follow under the established procedure and, if the findings are confirmed, measures will be taken under existing law, the committee said. It gave no timetable.

The committee also listed instructions that it said it had sent in 2025 and the first nine months of 2026 and that operators had carried out:

• Beeline ended the practice of moving customers to a daily tariff plan without warning when the account lacked funds for the monthly fee, and made outgoing calls to more than 100 short-number hotlines of state bodies free of charge.
• Mobiuz removed technical limits on switching to some tariff plans and ensured that full tariff terms are shown to customers.
• Ucell revised its public offer for mobile services to add provisions on liability for material and moral damage.

The committee's weekly digest lists the statement under 9 October, and Kun.uz reported it the next day.

What one operator's notices show

Because the statement gives no figures, Corridor Signal compared two sets of published terms from Mobiuz, one of the three operators the committee names. These are not necessarily the increases the committee is examining. Mobiuz's notice of 9 February set terms for eight plans. Seven of them were changed again in notices of 2 September and 21 September, which describe the included data as increased and the subscription fee as changed. Monthly fees and allowances moved as follows.

• Xotirjam 40: from UZS 54,000 for 20 GB to UZS 60,000 for 25 GB.
• Kerakli 45: from UZS 55,000 for 40 GB to UZS 60,000 for 45 GB, with minutes up from 3,000 to 5,000 and SMS from 3,000 to 3,500.
• Mazza, the 3,900-minute plan: from UZS 53,000 for 110 GB to UZS 60,000 for 120 GB, split equally between day and night in both versions.
• Xotirjam 25: from UZS 50,000 for 40 GB to UZS 55,000 for 45 GB.
• Jozibali, Mobi 25 and Omad Plus: from UZS 50,000 for 50 GB to UZS 55,000 for 55 GB.

Fees rose by 9.1 per cent to 13.2 per cent and data allowances by 9.1 per cent to 25.0 per cent, by Corridor Signal's calculation. Dividing the fee by the allowance, a crude measure that ignores minutes and SMS, the implied price per gigabyte fell by 11.1 per cent on Xotirjam 40, by 3.0 per cent on Kerakli 45 and by 2.2 per cent on Xotirjam 25, was unchanged on the Jozibali group and rose by 3.8 per cent on Mazza. On these plans the headline price per gigabyte therefore moved little, which is a narrower question than the committee's complaint about quality and rollover. The comparison assumes that no other change notices for these plans appeared between 9 February and 2 September, and none was found in the operator's English-language news list as reviewed on 17 October.

Mobiuz has since launched two plans. ORZU, announced on 7 October, costs UZS 80,000 for unlimited calls, 150 GB, 5,000 SMS and unlimited access to four social and messaging apps. Barchaga Plus, announced on 14 October, costs UZS 45,000 for 3,000 minutes and 1,000 SMS, with data at UZS 100 per megabyte, or UZS 100,000 per gigabyte by Corridor Signal's calculation.

Prices and sector growth

For comparison, consumer prices rose 3.4 per cent in January to August and prices of services 4.7 per cent, according to the National Statistics Committee. The same release said information and communication services grew by 21.2 per cent on a year earlier in the period, contributing 1.6 percentage points to growth in market services. The statistics committee does not give a separate figure for mobile services, so the release cannot show how mobile prices or revenue moved.