Mintsifra stopped licensing paging communications

Mintsifra will stop licensing paging services. This follows from the draft government decree published on the portal of draft regulatory legal acts. The technology of personal radio calling (paging) is outdated and is currently completely replaced in Russia by mobile radiotelephone technology, follows from the document.

This type of communication was popular in the 1990s: devices allowed you to receive text messages, but without the ability to compose and send a response. In order to send mail to a pager, it was necessary to dial the operator’s phone, give the number or name of the subscriber, and dictate the message.

Today, “the provision of communication services for data transmission can be used to replace the telephone number by the telecom operator by transferring the identifier to the public telephone network in a modified form under the guise of a subscriber number,” the order of the Ministry of Digital Development says. Thus, paging can facilitate the use of communication services for illegal purposes, the department warns.

The “golden age” of pagers fell on the 1990s, and by the middle of the 2000s the market had disappeared, because it was completely replaced by mobile communications, recalls Konstantin Ankilov, managing partner of TMT-Consulting. According to the analyst, services at that time were provided by a number of companies, such as Mobil Telecom, Radio Page, Telecomt, Vesso-Link, and others.

Mobile Telecom ceased to exist in 2005, according to the company’s website (the mobile-telecom.ru domain is still active). The legal entity of the Radio Page company was liquidated in 2013. Telecomt LLC, according to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, was liquidated in November 2021. The VessoLink company refocused on providing IT integration services and continues to exist (for example, VessoLink was one of the creators of the traffic monitoring system in Moscow).

The last license of the operator for paging communications expired in June 2023, Alexander Khinshtein, head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, United Russia deputy, told Vedomosti in June.

Cellular communications really survived paging communications, Denis Kuskov, CEO of Telecom Daily, agrees. Licensing stopped because this type of communication was no longer needed – the main companies stopped serving paging subscribers in the “zero”. Paging could only be used by a few companies for special needs, such as law enforcement or emergency services, he says.