I guess they don't plan to merge St.Petersburg and Moscow into the same billing region. St.Petersburg is always treated as North-West while Moscow is the Center. Actually, calling Moscow from St.Petersburg and back is quite cheap ($0.02-$0.03/min via calling cards and even free via some PC->Phone services), but I've never seen any real merging in tariffs. There are some specific discounts (such as MegaFon St.Petersburg users may call MegaFon Moscow users as if they were calling a local MegaFon number), but it's not the global rule. Anyway, this may change. As you can see, Moscow<->St.Petersburg calls are technically cheap, so why not? And, yes, the distance is about 650 or 700 km depending on how you count (from city border to city border or from city center to city center). Also, you are not right, there are lots of mobile users living outside of St.Petersburg and Moscow. By 2006 there were 124.9 millions of mobile subscribers in Russia. Moscow people had 1.34 number per a person, while it's about 0.85 per an average Russian (data accordingly to J?son & Partners). As you can see, Moscow people just have 2-3 phones (actually numbers) more often, while lots of regional users do have cellulars too.
Well, foreign tariffs for calling Russia is a real weird thing, it's based on many reasons. A foreign operator may use IP-telephony to send the traffic to Russia, thus calls to it's IP-telephony traffic landing points (usually Moscow and St.Petersburg) is usually cheaper. They may use 'official' connections with Rostelekom, and it will change the prices accordingly another rule (more flat, AFAIK). They may just set the prices flat to simplify billing accordingly the average expenses they take on all calls made to Russia. I don't know why Sakhalin is a bit cheaper in your example, may be they have another IP-traffic landing point somewhere on the Pacific cost, so it makes calls a bit cheaper. And, as you can see, calls to Russian cellulars cost the same as calls to Russian landlines, which is quite reasonable before the CPP rule starts to act. However, many foreign operators charge more for calls to Russian cellulars. Why? I have no idea. So, this is really weird, eventually. Looking from here, 2000+ km calls from one Russian place to another may cost from $0.05-$0.08/min (calling cards) to $0.10-$0.20/min (Rostelekom, the biggest fixed long distance provider) up to $0.80/min (on some cellular tariffs). Such the calls are usually much more expensive from cellulars, even though some tariffs are exceptions from this point of view.
Well, I don't understand any reasons to be against CPP. Do you mean some people want to have a local pseudo fixed number which is in fact cellular, and they accept the idea to receive non-free incoming calls? It's not against CPP, it's rather fixed->cellular redirection, as I described you in my previous message. What's else? You know, here are lots of people who are not any rich (pensioners and so on) and who do really suffer when they have to answer non-free calls from persons mistyping the numbers and so on (Caller ID does not always work). Why the hell do they have to pay for that while these inaccurate people pay nothing? This is much more important, IMHO, especially here.
You know, I haven't heard about real cellular numbers that do not have +79... aliases, but I'm not sure here are no any. That's because first Russian cellulars had only local numeration, and +79... range was created later. Many operators added +79... aliases for their old local cellular numbers then, but I was not sure that all did that. I'll try to find this out. By the way, they change Caller IDs in some cases, for example +78129... numbers, as they say, will get their +79... alias numbers as their Caller IDs soon.
Talking about the possible Russian billing collapses I meant calls from one region to another. Just imagine, a user from Sakhalin calls a +7812... number (St.Petersburg city code). The caller's operator in Sakhalin should be able to distinguish St.Petersburg fixed numbers from St.Petersburg cellular numbers placed in +7812... in order to pay the mobile surcharge to the recipient's operator in St.Petersburg, right? It should know that +78127164... is a mobile and that +78127162... is not, and the same about Omsk, Tula, Sochi, Kemerovo, Kaliningrad etc.! This is collapse, that's why I mean they cannot directly apply the CPP rule to that local cellular numbers, so they should set the same rate for the whole city code (as it's set now) and put the extra expenses to owners of those cellular numbers (the virtual redirection stuff). And, local calls from a fixed phone to another fixed phone are not always free in Russia. Accordingly to the new law, a subscriber may pick at least one from three opportunities: free local calls with higher monthly subscription fee, billed local calls with no monthly subscription fee and the combination of them. Before the law, fixed phone networks in many Russian regions (but not in Moscow and not in St.Petersburg) applied non-free local calls tariffs with no other chance to their users...
Oh, what a huge message!
