TEHRAN – “Despite sanctions, we plan to establish the 5th Generation (5G) of telecom network,” the information and communication technology (ICT) minister wrote on his twitter account, Mehr reported on Sunday.

“We have held good meetings on launching of 5G network. It would be a great step forward for the country,” he said.

“Although U.S. sanctions reduce our speed, we will establish 5G as we completed 80 percent of the National Information Network and provided 20 villages with internet coverage per day,” he explained.

According to research by GSMA, which represents mobile operators worldwide, 5G is forecast to account for as many as 1.2 billion connections by 2025, likely to cover one-third of the world's population.

The first phase of e-government services project in Iran officially came on stream under the title of ‘Mobile Government’ in mid-May 2018.

The project aims to facilitate some government services, reduce unnecessary expenses and ease traffic jam, which is the main cause of air pollution in big cities.

It is based on the National Information Network, an ongoing project to develop a secure and stable infrastructure network in the country.

According to the UN report released in June 2018, Iran moved 20 notches up to rank 86 among 193 countries in the United Nations E-Government Development Index (EGDI 2018) in comparison with EGDI 2017.

Iran’s EGDI value was 0.6083 this year. Regarding the sub-items, the country got 0.6319 score in the online service index (OSI), 0.4566 in the telecommunication infrastructure index (TII), and 0.7364 in the human capital index (HCI) this year.

Iran was amongst 17 countries that transitioned from Middle- to High-EGDI level group.

SB/MQ/MG