MINISTRY OF ECONOMY
AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
OF GEORGIA

Deputy Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development, Akaki Saghirashvili and Mariam Sulaberidze, the Head of the Open Net, arrived in the pilot region selected by the Government of Georgia, where the implementation of the state Internet program will start. Representatives of the Ministry together with the State Representative of Guria, Zurab Nasaraia, met with the heads of the administrative units of the settlements, which will soon be covered by the optical internet. Representatives of the Parvus Group also attended the meeting since they, in accordance with the agreement signed with the Open Net, will design and build broadband infrastructure in the Ozurgeti municipality. Construction of the pilot network is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year.

The first stage of the Universal Internetisation Pilot project is the development of the design, which will be immediately followed  by the construction works. The pilot project will be implemented in the Ozurgeti municipality of the Guria Region, taking into account the criteria for selection of the program pilot area and the number of settlements and population in the target geographical areas of the white zone, as well as the possibility of implementation of the project in a short period of time. The Region characteristic are as follows: number of settlements – 49, number of households – 8 516, total population – 28 576 people, optical cable length - 145 km.

“I would like to congratulate the population of Ozurgeti and the whole district on the launch of the internetization project. These 49 settlements in the pilot region selected by the Georgian Government will have access to high-quality fibre-optic high-speed internet by the end of this year,” – Akaki Saghirashvili, the Deputy Minister of Economy, said at the meeting in Ozurgeti. Mariam Sulaberidze, the Head of the Open Net, gave a detailed presentation of the project to the participants.

Within the framework of the state program of universal internetization, the Open Net announced the market/price research for the design and construction of the broadband infrastructure in the target geographical area of Ozurgeti from March 9 of this year, on the basis of which the company with the best proposal - Parvus Group Ltd. was selected. The company has implemented a number of large-scale public and private projects before.