Observations at the main entrance – Newspaper Kommersant No. 226 (7427) dated 12/06/2022

Rostelecom expects to receive preferential loans in the amount of 1.2 billion rubles. on smart home systems – from home video surveillance to access control to apartment buildings, Kommersant learned. The authorities are already looking for a place for video surveillance and Internet intercoms in the standards and requirements, and experts believe that in such conditions, the demand for these systems will grow.

A subsidiary of Rostelecom (RTK IT LLC) expects to receive preferential loans for the development of its smart home services, follows from the project passports available to Kommersant, submitted to the Software Development Management Development Competence Center, which is supervised by the Ministry of Digital Development. According to the documents, the company has applied for a loan of 625 million rubles. at a rate of 3% for the development of the Rostelecom Key system, the term of the loan and the credit institution are not mentioned. Another loan, for 600 million rubles, is planned to be received for work on the Video Surveillance and Smart Home system. The passports indicate that both projects were approved by the working group. Rostelecom declined to comment, and the Ministry of Digital Transformation did not respond to Kommersant.

Rostelecom Klyuch combines intercom control, video surveillance of the territory of an apartment building and data collection from meters. According to the document, Rostelecom is replacing the Comelit intercom software platform with its own, and is also changing the Internet intercoms of foreign BAS-IP and Akuvox. The company plans to develop a progressive web application (PWA; a specially marked site that can be installed on phones in the same way as programs) for Key. This is necessary to “eliminate dependence on foreign App Store and Google Play app stores.” By the end of 2024, Rostelecom wants to increase the number of entrances connected to the platform to 300 thousand, the market potential is estimated at 1 million entrances. The company did not specify Kommersant how many entrances are connected now, in September Rostelecom stated that 2.6 thousand houses and 332 thousand households were connected to the system.

The project for the development of an in-house video surveillance system by Rostelecom is also calculated until the end of 2024. The company hopes to sell 861,000 video cameras, twice as many as the number of cameras activated by September 2022 (420,000) announced by Rostelecom. Rostelecom’s home video surveillance system was introduced in 2018, Rostelecom Klyuch in 2020.

Now the relevant ministries and market participants are discussing the creation of standards for smart apartment buildings, including those with specific requirements for devices and software. So, developers, telecom operators and electronics manufacturers propose to create a register of smart meters (see “Kommersant” dated November 28), and Deputy Head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade Vasily Shpak proposed including video cameras with license plate recognition in the set of rules for multi-apartment buildings (see “Kommersant” dated July 4).

Demand for access control systems in apartment buildings may grow by 2024, as ministries and law enforcement agencies are interested in their distribution, says MForum analyst Alexei Boyko. He does not rule out that in the future there may be a regulation that would make the installation of such systems mandatory. Rostelecom, like other federal operators, is in a more advantageous position in relation to other market participants – “they can not only develop and produce access control devices, but also install them, provide connection to communication channels and service.”

It is possible to implement the functionality of the Rostelecom Key client in PWA, however, web applications, as a rule, do not work well on iOS devices, said Pavel Golub, co-founder of Arcsinus digital platform development company. “PWA notifications on iPhone are unstable, and for a smart intercom, sending notifications is the main way to get attention,” he said. In addition, PWAs are less battery efficient than installed apps and experience lag. Mr. Golub, however, is confident that the web application will be able to implement basic functions such as video surveillance, provided that the mechanism is worked out.

Yuri Litvinenko