Bad Internet will be hit with a fine. But the question is where to get a good one if there is no equipment?

Amendments to the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation, which provide for penalties for providers for an unstable signal, were adopted back in 2020 as part of a package of laws on the sovereign Internet. Fixing the penalty for communication outages was postponed to the beginning of 2023. It is noted that the responsibility is provided for telecom operators, owners or other owners of the technological network who could not ensure the stable operation of communications. The amount of fines is not large: citizens will be from three thousand to five thousand rubles, for officials — from five to ten thousand, for sole proprietors — from ten to twenty thousand and for legal entities — from thirty to fifty thousand rubles.

Telecom operators and experts interviewed by Novye Izvestia note that it is not yet clear exactly how the norm will work. But the interlocutors agree that it is unlikely that operators will be fined for subscribers' complaints about poor communication.

Pavel Katkov, lawyer, member of the RF CCI Committee on Entrepreneurship in the field of media communications, noted that Roskomnadzor will deal with this issue.

"I believe that Roskomnadzor, as a regulator, will determine in the order of its inspections whether the norms of the law are being observed. I do not exclude that permanent technical control systems will be introduced in the future, but so far there is no such data," the expert noted, "the GR divisions of companies to which the innovation increases the regulatory burden had to track this moment and work with the document from the point of view of its balance. Accordingly, either they missed it, or they worked that way, or they couldn't do anything."The head of the Telecom Daily agency Denis Kuskov noted that, most likely, fines will be imposed in case of some global problems with the communication infrastructure.

"There is no understanding of how this will work yet", - the expert says, - "operators operate according to the law on communications, and so far there is nothing new regarding these principles. The operator must provide a stable connection, for example, no more than 5% of gaps on the Internet. This does not mean that if a person could not access the Internet or could not get through, he writes a complaint and the operator is fined, and everything is reimbursed to him. If for some period of time, when a person wanted to get a servant, something did not work out, but most of the time everything worked, the operators will not be punished. Problems may arise if, for example, the base station fails and the Internet may not work for an entire block for several days. But this happens categorically rarely".

The press service of Tele2 told Novye Izvestia that the regulations that have come into force do not apply to user experience at all.

"Tele2 strictly follows the requirements of Russian legislation, and the implementation of this regulation is no exception. It involves ensuring uninterrupted power supply and the use of means of communication that meet the requirements of information security. The requirements prohibit warranty technical support and modernization of communication facilities by foreign companies, unauthorized remote updating or management of them from the territory of a foreign state, unauthorized transmission of information about the infrastructure.  In summary, we are not talking about the stability of the mobile Internet from the point of view of customer experience, but about the requirements for the infrastructure of operators in the context, first of all, of information security", - the company noted.

How to maintain a signal without equipment?

The amendments were adopted in 2020, but in 2022 the situation on the telecom market changed dramatically. After the start of ITS, a number of important suppliers of equipment for the operation of the network infrastructure refused to work in Russia. So the American Cisco, European Nokia and Ericsson and several other vendors stopped supplying equipment to Russia. Chinese Huawei and ZTE did not impose direct bans, but they stopped supplying equipment. During the year, Nokia nevertheless broke through the restrictions, having received permission to fulfill its obligations under the contracts. But globally, the country was left without equipment. It is proposed to solve the problem in two ways: in fire mode, create Russian analogues and configure their mass production, or parallel import.

Denis Kuskov from Telecom Daily notes that too little time has passed since the vendors left to affect the quality of communication. But the operators have another year to find a solution to the problem.

"The foreign equipment is gone, the routers and routers that are installed by the company's customers are purchased in China, but the base stations are gone," the expert says, "I don't think this will lead to a big drop in speeds by the end of the year. Although, according to our Megabitus application, the speed has decreased by about 2 Mbit/s over the year. But this is not critical yet. If domestic equipment does not appear in 2024, this may lead to a decrease in speed characteristics and communication quality".

The press service of Rostelecom noted that they have been supporting the development of Russian equipment since 2014.

"We are already an anchor customer in a number of projects aimed at developing not only manufacturers of telecommunications equipment, but also domestic manufacturers of electronic components. These projects cover the main trunk and server equipment", - the company said, - "In December last year, the construction of an underwater fiber-optic communication line Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky — Anadyr, laid in the coastal waters of the Bering Sea, was completed. Despite the increased delivery times and the changed cost of purchasing customer equipment, we managed to quickly stabilize this process internally. To date, we have sufficient stock in warehouses. We have kept the prices for sale as much as possible". Tele2 said that in 2022 the quality of the Internet has not fallen, despite the general problems with the supply of equipment.

"We have sufficient stocks of equipment to maintain and improve the quality of services. We do not observe a degradation in the quality of technical service. Despite the difficulties with deliveries in 2022, we continued to implement technical development projects: in September, we launched a network in the Khabarovsk Territory. Together with other operators and domestic suppliers, we are working on various scenarios for the creation, testing and operation of Russian equipment within the framework of the industrial competence center", - the company said.