mobile operators from Russia will remain without roaming in Canada due to sanctions – Kommersant

Canadian cellular operators have broken or are in the process of breaking roaming agreements with the largest Russian operators, said RBC citing sources at several companies. According to one of them, Canadian companies explained this by sanctions against Russian operators.

“We received notifications about the termination of the service, then one by one local operators began to disconnect us from roaming,” one of RBC’s sources said.

As the sources explained, until now, Russian companies could switch to another operator or transfer traffic to customers through an operator from another country that has roaming agreements with the disconnected operator. In the case of Canada, it is impossible to work according to the first option, since all operators break agreements, and it takes time to organize work according to the second option.

The information was confirmed by representatives of MegaFon and VimpelCom. According to them, while roaming services are available to customers in Canada. VimpelCom also clarified that Canada is the first country where Russian operators have encountered such a problem.

As a representative of the Canadian telecom operator BCE Inc. told RBC, the decision to limit roaming for the Big Four was made due to Canada’s sanctions against Russia. According to him, the operator will continue to provide roaming services to the Russian Ekaterinburg-2000 (Motiv in the Sverdlovsk and Kurgan regions, Khanty-Mansiysk and Yamalo-Nenets autonomous regions).

According to RBC, citing a source in one of the Russian operators, about 10,000 Big Four subscribers currently use roaming in Canada. Most of them relocated to the country or came on a business trip. According to another RBC source, the number of subscribers in Canada is extremely small, and the problem is not large-scale.

In July Canada introduced sanctions against MTS, MegaFon, T2 RTK Holding (Tele2 brand) and VimpelCom (Beeline brand). As explained in the government, the restrictions were introduced due to the companies’ ties with the Russian military-industrial complex.

More details – in the material “Kommersant” “Authorized in full”.

Olesya Pavlenko