Bayan Telecommunications
| Bayan Telecommunications | |
|---|---|
| |
| Type | State Company |
| Slogan | "Communication is Life" |
| Founded | 1935 |
| Location | Buxara |
| Key people | CEO |
| Employees | 47,205 |
| Industry | Communications |
| Products | Telecommunications services & infrastructure, Information Technology services & infrastructure, Television broadcasting |
| Revenue |  11 million Som (roughly equivalent to fiscal year 2007)
|
Bayan Telecommunications, often shortened to BayanTelecom, is the state-run company responsible for telephone and teliteksi services in Turkestan. It is one of the most successful companies in Turkestan, despite a reputation for irregularity of service. Contrary to popular belief (see How to tell if you're Turkestani), the phones do work, most of the time.
History
From the outset, the telecommunications company of Turkestan was separate from the postal company. The Bayan company was initially a telegraph operator, one of several small telegraph companies founded under Chinese influence during the late Qurultai period. In the 1930s after the attempted Russian invasion of 1931, telegraphy was considered an infrastructure project that was critical to national defence, and with Chinese technical assistance telegraph cables were laid across large stretches of the country. Close to cities and towns, these were buried, but Turkestan is a large country, and the man-hours necessary to bury all of the new telegraph cables just did not exist. Turkestan, along with many other nations, was beginning to move to a "war preparedness" footing, and it was considered that a lot of civil infrastructure modernisation would just have to wait.
Most of the small telegraph companies of the Qurultai period quickly ran out of money; Bayan and the Turkestani-Chinese Telegraph Company (TQTK) were the two most sucessful, surviving right up to Turkestan's entry into the Central Asian War. Of the two, TQTK was the most prosperous and prominent, but the Russian-sponsored Government of National Unity that emerged after that conflict gave its favour to the neutrally-named BayanTelecom rather than TQTK, and enabled what amounted to a leveraged takeover of TQTK by its smaller competitor.
Telephones were introduced in the mid 1960s, but did not really take off immediately. Many people preferred to have dealings face to face, and flatly refused to have anything to do with the strange new technology. However, for government communications, telephones quickly caught on, and the speed of Governmental telephone communications compared to other systems did eventually recommend the new telephone technology to the masses. Many people still exhibit a preference for face-to-face dealings, however, and some small villages still have only one or two telephones at all. In cities and large towns, however, the house without a phone is rare, and teliteksi is making inroads in the largest urban areas, especially the capital Buxara and the second city Almaliq.
Bayan TV
In 2006, BayanTelecom bought out the failing TV broadcaster TKN-1, renaming the channel Bayan-1.
