Telecommunications contracts are not usually very interesting to read, aren't they? The language used is functional; the press releases are short; the business case, route diversity, resiliency, and expansion are typical refrains in the telecommunications industry and at infrastructure conferences all around the world. The press release issued Tuesday about the cooperation agreement signed by AzerTelecom, Azerbaijan’s main backbone provider, and Telecom Armenia did not deviate from this pattern.

According to the two partners, it was an agreement regarding mutual transit of international Internet traffic with a view to increasing route diversity and resiliency in the South Caucasus region.

The news value of the agreement lies not at all in its bandwidth, but in its geographic implications. For the first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, international Internet traffic from Armenia will flow through Azerbaijani territory, which only recently would have been considered unthinkable.

Understanding why a fibre-optic routing deal constitutes geopolitical news is facilitated by considering how Armenia has been accessing the outside world over the last thirty years. Having had its borders closed by Azerbaijan and Türkiye because of the conflict in Karabakh. Armenia has been able to reach out internationally in two ways: north via Georgia and south via Iran. The fact that it was not called a sanctions system is that nobody has imposed this restriction explicitly – it was only a result of an ongoing territorial dispute, where there was no way in which the aggressor and victim would share a cable line. The map of the network infrastructure was the same as that of confrontation.

This default has since changed. AzerTelecom, which is a member of the NEQSOL Holding’s Azerconnect Group and an operator of Azerbaijan’s “Digital Silk Way” project, will transit traffic heading to Armenia on its own network. Telecom Armenia will respond in kind by opening up its network for traffic heading to Azerbaijan. What ensues is a newly created route that connects both networks, a route that never existed until now in a commercial sense.

V principle, finally literal

The policy underpinning the agreement has been in the works for several years prior to this week. After the 2020 war, the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, listed five basic principles that would form the basis of any future peace process:........

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