Thanks to the Soviet government! Why is the Internet so cheap in Russia

Against the background of the general technological backwardness of our country, which is aggravated every day due to Western sanctions, there is an area in which Russia remains a positive example for the rest of the world - the development of the Internet and digitalization in the broad sense of the word. According to the British company Cable.co.uk, Russia is one of the five countries with the cheapest internet in the world - on a par with Belarus and Ukraine. For example, broadband access to the network, on average, is 3 times cheaper than in Europe and 8 times cheaper than in the US.

It was the low consumer cost that led to the era of advanced digitalization in our country. True, according to expert Yegor Palamarchuk, this would not have been possible without the Soviet legacy:

“The phenomenon of the Russian “Internet miracle” has many explanations. The most understandable is the initial introduction of the most advanced technologies instead of gradual modernization as in Europe and the USA. The peculiar legislative environment in terms of digitalization also helped - its looseness and non-optimality at some point played into the hands of ambitious high-tech representatives.

We must thank the builders of red Atlantis. Large infrastructure investments in sources of cheap electricity, primarily from hydroelectric and nuclear power plants, as well as traditionally low tax rates on utility bills, have laid the foundation on which the current "internetization of the whole country" is built.

We stand on the shoulders of the infrastructural architecture of a state that has sunk into oblivion. The "electric veins" laid under him still supply cheap energy, the main fuel of digitalization - a bright and important sign of the well-fed tenths and the beginning of the twenties, as well as a strong foundation for the coming decades..."

However, the expert warns that the safety margin of the Soviet skeleton is not eternal - one day its bones will finally crack and fall apart. Then, according to the Hamburg account, you will have to compare the level of the legacy of the Soviet era and the Russian one.