Tajikistan gets a direct internet link to China: a new 1 Tbit/s channel
A digital corridor Dushanbe — Khorog — Kulma — Karasu — Beijing is now live through the Kulma pass. It starts at up to 1 Tbit/s, with up to 10 Tbit/s planned. Here is what it means for users and websites in Tajikistan.
Tajikistan now has one more way out to the global internet — and this time it is a direct one, through China. The documents launching the Tajikistan — China International Digital Corridor were signed by Tajiktelecom CEO Bakhtovar Abudsattorzoda and Lu Jing, head of the Eurasia region at China Mobile International; the line went live on 17 October, according to the Communications Service under the Government.
The route
The Tajik part is the Dushanbe — Khorog — Kulma fibre trunk, 1,010 km long. The hardest stretch, about 435 km, runs through the high mountains of Gorno-Badakhshan. The line meets the Chinese network at the Kulma pass, 4,363 metres above sea level, and from there traffic continues via Karasu along a roughly 6,100 km Chinese trunk to Beijing. It is the country's fifth international connection point.
The numbers
In the first phase a 16-fibre optical cable serves the Dushanbe — Khorog — Kulma section, and DWDM equipment provides a starting capacity of up to 1 Tbit/s. With more multiplexing platforms the channel is planned to grow to 10 Tbit/s, and the infrastructure itself is said to support hundreds of terabits. For comparison, the sector strategy targets 2 Tbit/s of total international capacity for the whole country by 2030 — the new corridor covers a noticeable share of that goal from day one.
What changes
- A backup path. If one external link fails, traffic can take another route, so the network becomes more resilient.
- A direct link to Hong Kong. Tajiktelecom's network connects to the HKIX internet exchange, which also hosts mirrors of the root DNS servers. That should shorten the path to Asian services — marketplaces, clouds, gaming platforms — although real-world speed will depend on each provider's routing and on the specific service.
- Transit and data centres. The corridor opens up data transit between China, Central Asia and, later, South Asia, and together with cheap hydropower makes the country more attractive for data centres, including GPU servers for AI.
- Connectivity for the Pamirs. The trunk crosses Gorno-Badakhshan, improving the outlook for education and business in the region.
What it means for websites
For owners of .tj websites, larger and more diverse external links mean faster loading of foreign libraries, cloud services and CDNs, and lower latency for visitors from abroad reaching servers in Tajikistan. How soon subscribers notice depends on how providers rebalance their traffic: such changes usually arrive gradually.
The websites of the country's operators and providers are collected in the Telecom & internet section of our catalog, where you can compare what each of them offers.
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