Delivery without notification – Newspaper Kommersant No. 35 (7480) dated 03/01/2023

Although Russian telecom operators and the Ministry of Digital Transformation have repeatedly stated that they do not see risks due to the withdrawal of foreign manufacturers of telecommunications equipment from Russia and have enough stocks of base stations to “maintain and improve” the quality of services, there are still indirect signs of a decrease in network throughput.

For example, the other day, a message appeared on the portal of the SMS-center mailing aggregator that MegaFon stopped transmitting final SMS statuses through its network. Starting March 1, all SMS messages sent between MegaFon subscribers will have the final status “delivered”, regardless of the actual receipt. The operator’s customers who send more than 100,000 messages per month will be able to check the number of sent and delivered messages in their personal account upon request.

MegaFon says that the changes are “related to the transition to billing for delivered SMS messages and the need to increase the transparency of the mailing market,” but did not explain how. Other operators still claim that the services for transferring the final status of messages work without changes, but raise the prices for sending messages (transactional, authorization, service, etc.). From March 1, prices will increase for MTS and MegaFon, earlier, from January, they also changed for Tele2.

It can be assumed that in the future, MegaFon can also make the transfer of final SMS statuses a paid service – it will be in demand to a greater extent by corporate clients, in particular banks, for which it is important to know, for example, whether the user has reached the authorization code in the mobile application.

But another non-obvious consequence of the operator’s decision seems to be just a decrease in the load on the communication infrastructure: the transfer of message statuses is a significant amount of traffic. Earlier, MegaFon said that in addition to building base stations, operators “have other tools for developing the network”, in particular, “point improvement of technical characteristics through effective management.” It seems that in this case it is about him.

Increasing tariffs for SMS-mailings can also help reduce the load on the network. Given the shortage of foreign equipment, which, according to my interlocutors in the telecom market, continues to persist and may even intensify this year, this approach will allow us to win in capacity. In 2022, operators have already reduced the volume of installation of new base stations by more than 60% (see Kommersant on February 6), and judging by the fact that they have not yet announced large-scale network upgrade projects, this year we have not yet once we see how free services become paid or disappear altogether.