It's known 1st of July is the date when CPP (calling party pays) will actually be launched in Russia, because the new law regulations including the CPP rule are going to be officially valid since that day. So, the current situation is following:

- All the cellular operators (or at least most of them including the biggest ones) have already declared any incoming calls will be free since 1st of July. There's one more funny thing that some tariffs have free incoming calls since May of June, which was positioning as a sort of incredible offer from an operator. :lol: So, fixed->local cellular calls were free for about 1-2 months for both sides. You may guess this would result in network busy problems and collapses on some BTS? No, everything was and is fine, may be because people here are not used to call cellulars from landlines (keep thinking this would make a person you call to pay for your call).

- Landline monopolists have declared calls from fixed phones to cellulars of the same regions to be not free since 1st of July. The tariff is set from the state committee (since it's being regulated by them as other monopolist's tariffs), and is 1.5 rubles/min in most of the Russian regions except of some far-north ones, where the tariff is a bit higher. Actually, 1.5 rubles/min is the highest allowed by the committee tariff, but it's the same as the tariff actually used in most of the regions, as you may guess. :) 1.5 rubles is about 5.5 USD cents or 4.4 Euro cents, which is not very expensive, so sometimes it will be cheaper to call a cellphone from a fixed phone, than to call it from another cellphone.

- Rumor has that some cellular operators asked for 4 or 5 cents per minute for accepting incoming traffic from other operators, but this won't apply to fixed operators (because 1.5 rubles/min can't be exceeded and fixed operators won't pay more than they get from their subscribers for such the calls) and it's supposed to kill sub 4-5 cents/min offers to mobiles to any operator of your home region, but all of them are still alive on the market.

So, the CPP rule is about to start working here since 1st of July, both in the law and in the operators' tariffs, eventually.

Today is the first day of CPP here. :) Surely, we had no celebrations, although people are going to arrange protests in some Russian regions, where the prices have been raised (outgoing calls prices, GPRS etc., which was declared to be 'inevitable increase to compensate extra expenses because of CPP'). Luckily, nothing has changed in St.Petersburg cellular tariffs, except of the 0.00 per incoming calls. :) So, Russia is no longer CSP, keep it in mind.

Interesting info.
I expect to see how this will reflect on high roaming charges.....

Which charges? For foreign SIMs used in Russia or for Russian SIMs used abroad? Nevertheless, I'm quite pessimistic here, I don't think CPP in Russia will affect roaming soon. May be later... :unsure:

Well, when you announced for first time that president Putin signed the CPP law, I asked you if anyone in the Duma was against. That time, I didn't think about necessary raising the rates of calls to mobile phones and what will be the reaction of the society for this aspect of CPP (I feel justified however for not thinking about this - Poland moved to CPP sometime in 1994 when only 0.5% of population had mobile phones :)).

But why the hell GPRS is more expensive? What does it have in common with CPP?

I meant incoming charges from roaming sims used in Russia....

GPRS surely has nothing in common with CPP, but some operators (mostly small and regional) have raised GPRS price justifying it by compensating extra expenses occurred because of CPP. It seems crazy to me, but it's fact, I've heard about such things. Let's see what will happen then. The most interesting thing is those 4-5 cents for traffic intercharge (see my first post), I wonder if it will kill the cheapest mobile to mobile offers or not.

And, talking about incoming charges for SIMs roamed in Russia, I hope they will decrease, but nobody can be sure. :unsure:

I suppose that we will also soon see an increase for calls that terminate to mobiles in Russia...

Possibly yes, because I currently see no reasons to dramatically raise up foreign tariffs for calling Russian mobiles. It's usually more expensive to call European mobiles than European landlines because European mobile operators take some extra fee to terminate a call, but I haven't heard here's going to be something similar. May be a bit later, though.

Well, it seems that I understood you correctly :whistle: . In other words, users who use GPRS will pay (in some part) for CPP for all the users including those who don't use GPRS at all? Perhaps it's OK about the cashflow but it's also very strange from the marketing point of view....