Column by Yulia Tishina on the prospects for the development of communication services in Russia

The concept of joint consumption has long and firmly entered our lives in terms of sharing cars, scooters, housing, various services and services. However, now the sharing economy is becoming an inevitable mechanism for further development for more conservative industries, in particular telecommunications.

The problem of the shortage of Western equipment, which was supposed to be solved by parallel imports, is already affecting the quality of services and the speed of networks: this fact is actually recognized by the authorities in the industry development strategy until 2035, which has been discussed in the government in recent months.

Operators are offered to save not only funds for the purchase of scarce equipment and stocks of base stations by sharing both base stations and the frequency spectrum. So, operators will have to share base stations in remote settlements and along federal highways (see Kommersant of June 20). In addition, on the basis of frequency sharing and infrastructure, it is planned to develop a new generation 5G communication standard (see Kommersant dated June 29).

In the case of remote and small settlements, operators take on an exclusively social burden: despite the fact that infrastructure sharing is supposed to be on commercial terms, it is unrealistic to pay back such networks in the coming years. But this is just one of the possible problems: sharing networks increases the risks to their security due to the increasing load.

Although accidents on the networks of large telecom operators are rare, they nevertheless happen. In 2017, due to a malfunction in the operation of Hewlett-Packard hardware and software, the MegaFon network was unavailable in a number of Russian cities for almost a whole day (see Kommersant dated May 19, 2017).

The other day, not so large in scale, but a noticeable failure occurred in the MTS network: subscribers in 12 regions, including Nizhny Novgorod, Saratov, Kazan, Izhevsk, Togliatti, Samara, Orenburg and other cities, could not use the operator’s services for almost two hours . In the regional ministry of digital affairs, the failure was explained by a major accident on the highway.

If in the future part of the communication networks in Russia will be built on the principle of sharing, in the event of such accidents, a larger number of subscribers may suffer: the clients of the partner operator will use the base stations of the dominant player. Under these conditions, companies will bear great reputational risks.

To reduce the risks of congestion while providing access to competitors on their networks, operators will need to upgrade their equipment and obtain additional licenses. It is possible that attempts to save money may, on the contrary, result in additional costs.