The lag so far is only in terms of quality improvement

This opinion was expressed by the Internet Ombudsman, a member of the expert council of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives and the general council of Delovaya Rossiya, Dmitry Marinichev, during a press conference at the DOS on the topic “Why are mobile communications and the Internet deteriorating in Russia?”

There are indeed prerequisites for such a deterioration: for example, according to analysts, in 2022, operators reduced the volume of installation of new base stations by more than 60%. According to preliminary estimates, the total number of stations installed in 2022 reached 25-30 thousand, and according to forecasts for 2023, this number will decrease to 10-15 thousand. Such trends are associated with the departure of Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei from the Russian market. In the second half of 2022 and early 2023, users began to notice a deterioration in mobile communications and the Internet.

Nevertheless, as Dmitry Marinichev noted, in one form or another, the connection continues to work with the same speeds and quality that it had a year ago, the lag so far is only in the speed of modernization and development of the network:

“Maybe the network doesn’t have time to respond to calls for services that are more demanding on the infrastructure, and hence there is a feeling of poor quality. But this does not mean that it has become worse and something has begun to break down, rather it is a discrepancy between the speed of infrastructure development, needs, and the amount of data that is transmitted with the growing penetration of digitalization into society. We begin to use more actively, more; comes more business tasks that require, again, bandwidth. It is these inconsistencies that create the problem of network quality today.”

Sometimes, according to Dmitry Marinichev, problems in content delivery arise due to the fact that some service blocked in Russia is used somewhere: this leads to the fact that the response time of some classic service increases, and subscribers’ claims present to the operator and say that the quality of services of the operator has deteriorated.

As the second participant of the press conference, Chairman of the Board of the Digital Economy Development Fund German Klimenko, noted, the active use of VPN services can also affect the traffic slowdown:

“Of course, the user’s impression of the quality of the connection depends on which VPN he uses. If a bad VPN, one gets the same impression that the Internet is bad. People are already actually sitting on a VPN. A week ago, a survey was conducted that showed that 70% of young people use VPNs. It is clear that they most likely sit on it all the time, and this is an increase in traffic, because our signal goes first somewhere to conditional Germany, and then to the target. So, due to a combination of reasons, the user gets the impression that we have turned from a country that was proud of the fact that we are developing into a country that is stagnating.”

Dmitry Marinichev also agreed with the interlocutor’s opinion:

“If we use a VPN, then consider that we give a double load on the network. If we pass laws that obligatory force the operator to store all traffic and filter it. And not only to filter, but also to install equipment that is controlled by Roskomnadzor and actually not controlled by the operator, all this also creates a “bottleneck” effect, because the throughput of this equipment affects the throughput of the telecom operator. And from all these little things (although they cannot be called trifles), a general picture of the efficiency of the entire network and the operation of the Internet as such is formed.

Therefore, according to Dmitry Marinichev, if we solve the problem of improving network operation and improving the quality of communication, then, perhaps, we should first consider the issue of rolling back similar legislative initiatives of recent years (for example, the so-called “Yarovaya package”), because so far no one has analyzed how effective they are and whether it’s just wasted money on the part of telecom operators. I would like to know if there is any benefit from the information stored over the past two years, or if telecom operators are wasting huge budgets into the implementation of such laws that they could spend on network development.

Sergei Ishkov.

Photo yanaly / Freepik