It seems as though all the negative campaigns against Türk Telekom has paid off. They announced today that virtually all the ADSL pakets they offer will see speed increases of 400%.

Hurray! No more 256Kbit crap!

The new prices will be as follows (for unlimited access only, the packages with quotas are pathetic and not worth mentioning:

taken from: http://www.ttnet.net.tr/adslucret.htm

The reason for this is that Japan now uses fiber-optic lines, delivered to every home while most other countries, including Turkey, still use the traditional copper telephone wires. The Turkish infrastructure is especially outdated, with still ADSL being used instead of ADSL2+.

I can give a first hand example of how extreme the prices are.

During my college years in Canada, I was using Bell Sypmatico ADSL: 3Mbit/s (3000Kbit/s) downstream and 640Kbit/s upstream for around $55CAN ($53US, wow the dollar is cheap nowadays…).

At Ankara, Turkey I use the most basic Türk Telekom ADSL: 256Kbit/s downstream and 64Kbit/s upstream for 49YTL (which exchanges to about $39US at xe.com right now) with the next package of 512/128 Kbit/s being around $62US.

So the prices were around 7 times more expensive for me.

Here is a great video for the Turkish speakers out there which point out this price difference:

[youtube 6q3mWQCcP6o]