"Megaphone" threatens to raise the price of communication because of the law of Spring

Megaphone CFO Gevorg Vermishyan gave an interview to Interfax, in which he spoke about the company's new strategy and that Megafon is not going to integrate with Mail.ru, whose stock they recently bought, in any case. He spoke about the new dividend policy and highlighted other issues. But he told the most interesting thing when he was asked about the assessment of the costs of implementing the “Spring Law”.



The CFO said that the introduction of additional infrastructure to comply with the requirements of the law “will definitely affect tariffs.”



How much the prices go up depends on the technical conditions and the exact cost calculations. Now the company is engaged in such calculations.



Gevorg Vermishyan said that there are still many uncertainties in the “Spring Law”. Most importantly, technical requirements have not yet been approved, so no one can name the exact amounts.



Megafon addressed manufacturers with a request for the availability of technical solutions to comply with the requirements of the “Spring Act”, but they cannot give an approximate cost of implementation until the technical requirements have been approved. “The question cannot be considered closed. There was a lot of subjective assessments from different individuals and from different companies in the information field, but you cannot rely on them: it is very difficult to calculate the exact amount without final technical specifications and a scheme for implementing the law, ”said Gevork Vermishyan.



But now we can name several consequences of the fact that operators are forced to keep a traffic archive of their subscribers.



Firstly, the prices for mobile communication and Internet access will definitely increase.



Secondly, the potential negative impact on the telecom industry and a significant reduction in the number of small players who simply do not pull such expenses is obvious, said MegaFon's financial director.



Most likely, the surveillance of citizens will be paid for by the citizens themselves : “In the context of fulfilling the requirements of the law, we are ready to spend on security, for example, 1% of revenue. If the execution of the law requires more substantial sums, then it is necessary to regulate the size of the increase in tariffs for subscribers, ”said the financial director of MegaFon.



The package of counter-terrorism amendments of Yarovaya and Ozerov was adopted in the summer of 2016. It obliges Russian telecom operators and Internet providers from July 2018 to keep user traffic for up to six months. The final storage parameters - terms and types of traffic - should be determined by the government, but this has not been done yet. The Ministry of Communications and Mass Media has developed by-laws with storage parameters of six months and 2 PB for each 1 Gbit / s of communication center bandwidth, but the Ministry of Economic Development has given them a negative conclusion.



According to the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), the proposals of the Ministry of Communications for the implementation of the “Spring Law” double the costs of market participants to 10 trillion rubles. According to RSPP estimates, from 2019, large operators will have to store 20 exabytes of information each. This may lead to a rise in the cost of communication services by several times and an increase in the level of inflation in the country by 1-2 percentage points.