Afghanistan - over 4 million wireless subscribers

Over the past few weeks the two major networks in Afghanistan have both announced that they have hit the two million subscribers mark. Afghan Wireless Communications hit this mark in May of this year, while its main Roshan rival caught up last week.

This all sounds pretty impressive given the stories we hear of bombs, terrorism and destruction every night on our news programmes. It just shows that underneath all that violence there is still a country and a population getting on with the job of living their lives the best they can.

Afghan Wireless Communications (which calls itself: “An Afghan Company, By Afghans, For Afghans”) has also been nominated for the GSMA’s Best Network Quality Initiative Award for 2008.

As an aside, if you want to get an insight into Afghan life over the last few decades (Soviet occupation, Mujahideen, Taliban) then you could do worse than read A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner. Both are beautifully written stories about lives that are vastly different from the ones we enjoy in the West.