Turkmenistan has a state-controlled press and monitored communication systems. Turkmenistan's telecommunications services are considered to be the least developed of all the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. Overall, the telecom market in this predominantly rural country is relatively small but has been trying boldly to expand in recent years. The state-owned Turkmen Telecom has been the primary provider of public telephone, email and internet services, and through a subsidiary has been operating a GSM mobile network in competition with a private mobile operator, BCTI (BCTI became MTS Turkmenistan in 2005). Satellite The launch of the first Turkmen communication satellite TurkmenSat 1 was launched in April 2015, the satellite has an anticipated service life of 15 years. The satellite was launched aboard SpaceX Falcon 9. The satellite is built by French Thales Alenia Space and is from the Spacebus 4000 family. The satellite will cover Europe and significant part of Asian countries and Africa and will have transmission for TV, radio broadcasting and the internet. The satellite's operations will be controlled by the state-run Turkmenistan National Space Agency (TNSA). Mobile BCTI was the only GSM operator in the country with a 10-year exclusive license granted in 1994. Due to lack of competition, BCTI continued to operate without investing much to cover rural areas. The expensive cost of the service has limited the number of subscribers to a very small percentage of the general population. The Mobile phone sector started to improve rapidly after the expiration of company's exclusive license in 2004. The Russian mobile phone operator MTS acquired BCTI and state owned communication company TurkmenTelekom opened a new subsidiary, Altyn Asyr. The number of mobile phone subscribers has now reached over 4,440,000 (MTS - 1,440,000 and Altyn Asyr GSM 3,000,000). With a population of 5 million, this translates into 88.8% mobile penetration rate. Internet Service Turkmenistan gained access to the Internet in 1997 through a contract with MCI Communications (later became MCI WorldCom). A small number of independent Internet Service Providers were forced out of business in 2001 when TurkmenTelecom was granted a monopoly over data services. Dependence on expensive satellite channels limited the availability of Internet to only two thousand subscribers. To upgrade the Internet backbone, Ministry of Communication signed a contract with TATA Communications for routing traffic through Transit-Asia-Europe fiber optic channel. As a result of this development, TurkmenTelecom started offering an access to the higher speed Internet