As the Turkmen authorities make plans to expand the mobile phone network, users say they fear it remains all too easy to listen in on their conversations.
On May 13, head of MTS, Leonid Melamed met Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov and said his firm was ready to provide Turkmenistan with the latest communications technology, including high-speed Internet access.
Official statistics show that Turkmenistan has 530,000 cellphone subscribers out of a population of five million. Eighty per cent of them use the MTS network, and the rest the state-owned Altyn Asyr/TM Cell.
MTS is more expensive than Altyn Asyr, which does not offer roaming services and takes more time to connect up new subscribers, sometimes up to a year.