Eldar Shamsutinov characterize Minister Musin, as a figure, who makes systemic mistakes.  Having curbed his emotions, Mr. Shamsutinov shared a dry analytics of most serious flaws in the Minister’s words an actions, by which cellular communication tariffs will increase.

Literal translation of Mr. Shamsutdinov’s telegram post is below:

“I am not a mobile telecommunication operator, by profession, but I have general understanding of the problems and why it is necessary to make cell market more expensive.  That is why, I think, that we should abandon that attitude, by which we keep saying that “Kazakhstan’s telecom is the cheapest or the most expensive”.

Is Kazakh Government Sound At All?

It is not acceptable, when the Ministry justifies its decisions by making reference to irrelevant international experience. 

Announcement of manipulative data in Mass Media is a crime 

My older comrades tell me “Stop attacking Musin”. We all are aware of infrastructure problems and

flaws in public governance, in general. Professional degradation of our Cabinet of Ministers is a part of reality

The present reality is something that reminds of an old army joke – “We drafted healthy ones, but we treat them, as smart ones”.

From Whom Is Minister Hiding in Instagram?

Independent experts must work to increase the level of competencies, not criticize each petty drawback. That is why, we need to scrutinize Musin and his actions, so to avoid petty criticism in future.

Let us analyze.  Let us start from Musin’s night message posted in Instagram.  It is a bad practice to publish explanations why they will increase tariffs and split operators without the prior discussion.  Tariffs are a sensitive issue for the public.  Such messages should be announced through the Central Communications Service, press-services or press-conferences.  The Ministry has all sorts of tools for interaction with society.

Instagram publications with comments from bots and fake likes deprive the author from feedback

Musin makes reference to the opinion expressed by iKS-Consulting of Russia.  That is a bad thing to do – the Minister shows that his Ministry and Kazakhstan, in general, do not have reliable and competent experts who can share data regarding mobile traffic consumption.  But, that is not true. 

He makes reference to Internet Accessibility to discuss the cost of the mobile telecom traffic. But that expert center calculates data in USD, which means their calculations are subject to volatility and are legitimate as at the time of calculation, not for a given period. Also, he compares package proposals (calls, internet, SMS and additional options) against direct sales of mobile traffic, which is not a relevant methodology.

Comparing traffic consumption in developing vs developed countries is not a good analytical exercise for a person in the office of a Minister.

Prompts for Minister

How Was it Necessary to Do That?

If we compare Kazakh tariffs against other countries, we should be based on PPP – Purchasing Power Parity.  Using USD to draw comparisons between consumption of sophisticated services is not a right thing to do, because national currencies are volatile.

Using and distributing data from a non-verified source is a bad practice.  Moreover, I think, the calculation of the traffic consumption is based not on direct consumption, but package sales. Not all users deplete purchased gigabytes to full.

For the proper analytics, we should take data from mobile operator.  For Musin’s Ministry that is a matter of one hour, after which hour the Minister will have a detailed analysis of the traffic consumption, consumption, as broken down in time and geolocations, as well as by age, gender and social status of consumer.

Let us analyze operators’ expenses and profits.  It will show that our mobile operators invest and earn within the limits of average global indicators, and there are no anomalies there.

Talks In Favor of the Poor

What is Wrong?

The state governance machine made a classical mistake, while designing the whole system.  For the sake performance indicators, supposed to report deep penetration of internet in our daily life and to show that the headcount of the users is growing, the Ministry nudged users towards mobile internet, to the detriment of the land telecommunication.

Mobile internet does give high concentration and high load on telecom hubs without opportunity to re-distribute the traffic.  Besides, we need more telecom mains and business-tariffs.  That is done, when there are new players and there is true market competition in place.  Let us be open – our market operators began to show flexibility an improved their quality only after the launching of Tele2.

That is why, the only answer to problems we have is market and competition, all other considerations are talks in favor of the poor”.