Azernews.Az

The growing number of smartphone users stimulates a significant increase in the number of mobile Internet users, Azerfon director general Kent McNeley told media on Thursday.

"As it grows, I believe, we will see a tremendous growth in data and phone usage - we have certainly seen that in Russia, in the other markets of CIS, and that should help to fuel to the continued growth of the mobile sector for the next several years," he said.

McNeley said the company continues to invest into the network and it had recently completed the major improvements in network.

"Last year we grew by almost 25% of subscribers and that made us the fastest-growing mobile operator in Azerbaijan," he added.

"In addition to that, our business is going to grow because of increase of data usage, constant developing of 3G and addition of 4G in next couple of years with a trend of increase of smart phone penetrations.The number of data subscribers in our network has more than doubled over the last year. All these things are going to drive a more data traffic, more data penetration, more usage and this will contribute into other significant parts of the business," he said.

McNeley said the focus needs to be made on continued development of 3G in the near term , because this technology will be much more meaningful to the bulk of consumers over the next several years.

"But for very high usage wireless consumers, 4G will be much more important and we are going to invest into that as well," he added.

He also said the company gradually increases the number of the planes equipped with OnAir equipment, adding that by summer 2014 , the company intend to get all AZAL planes, including the ones to be purchased very shortly, equipped with OnAir network.