To the folks at the blog-o-ramas spouting info from mid air, concerning the advent (or lack thereof) of Wi-Fi in Armenia ("Yerevan is almost covered, Giumri is completely covered"), my letter to a friend, someone who knows a few facts.

Hey jan!

Thanks, it was entertaining to read monkeys talk. I only used DSL at Tico's office, as a test. It worked great! I am still on dial up, 100 hours at $28, the best rate I have found.

This is an amazing example of gossip leading the facts: Yerevan is NOT almost covered, they have only done one small area of one marz, and Grisha predicts it will require 10,000 access points. Where do these guys get their information? Bullshit. I was just in Giumri and there is NO Wi-Fi connection. They have piss-poor dial up service at around $100 a month. Broadband It is prevented by ISPs and Armentel's refusing to grant upload link.

It will still cost around $100 a month for what you and I consider normal connection, even at Arminco's prices of 20 AMD per MB download. No wonder IT growth is stunted!

No this was not our Tico, someone else. I believe these capitalism rah ah rah guys are all wrong, and they forget that the entire technology of the Internet and its cheap use for them is based on heavy government investment and regulation against monopoly. It IS free to these folks on the blog, since they do not begin to pay their share of the original trillion dollar investment.

And to the guy who is blowing all this capitalism BS out of his ass (Nazarian: "this is a violation of the corporate right to make money" - PUHLEEEASE) : he sits in comfort because his government PAID for and PROVIDED the rule of law, education, public services, safety and security and all the infrastructures he needs in order to live, and it was paid for long ago, not now, and it was free, it is all deficit spending.

I laugh at the idea that somehow because someone sits in the west in comfort and reaps the rewards of an economy based on cheap outside labor and cheap outside resources, somehow understands "true capitalism". True capitalism is China dumping products on the market, stealing jobs and technology from the west. True capitalism is piracy and unfair advantage. We in the west are so far from anything remotely like true capitalism, as we are from true democracy (can you say, "representative government"?). Easy words, hard facts.

The use of the Internet is FREE for this guy. He did not pay for the development, his daddy might have chipped in a few defense tax dollars, nothing more. He simply is as ignorant as he is smug.

What is going on here is Armenia's free use of Western Governmental development of infrastructure and capacity, then taking it and reselling it to a cartel of ISP's to regulate prices (i.e. drive prices up.)

This is not all Armentel's fault, despite the constant sniping. Armentel has become a cover for an entire cadre of moneymakers, off the backs of simple users. Armentel simply saw a good deal and grabbed it. If you or I were offered monopoly of an entire industry, would we not be tempted? Armentel is merely the cover, and local ISPs are a part of the problem as surely as "Armentel".

To the gentleman seeking to excuse raw capitalism in someone else's yard, it was the bust up of the ATT monopoly that gave him cheap communications and cheaper internet use. To anyone who cares, it will take 4 competing comanies to bring about real competitive advantage to customers. Now we have one monopoly as a cover for a cartel of people taking advantage.

This is a terribly sad part of Armenia's development, the Soviet thinking so ingrained they have to divide bytes of information into ishkhan-priced prices. They do not want people having easy access to the world (they do not want them having easy acess to anything), as evidenced by these prices. Someone makes $200-300 a month, and they should pay $120 a month for what costs $19.99 in the states??