Russia Moves To Calling Party Pays

[Asick]

About different regions, I'm sure that this will be working the way it works now, I mean the CPP rule will only be applied while a subscriber is located within his or her home region, otherwise it would be treated as 'innernetwork' roaming, which does include approximately $0.20-$0.30/min per any incoming call on it's tariff list. I don't think it'll be changed in the nearest future, I have not heard any plans about canceling this feature. The only thing we can expect here is merging some regions from the cellular point of view (i.e. local tariffs for the whole North-West or Central, or another big area). Anyway, this is reasonable, just imagine how much a call from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok might cost and so on. Making this flat all around the country would inevitable result into global raising of the current tariffs.

I'm not sure if there were some opponents to the CPP rule in the Duma, I don't know the details, but I guess there were not really much, because it's quite difficult to imagine even a few arguments against CPP. AFAIK they discussed mostly about some details (dates, billing, mutual charges etc.).

Most of the Russian cellular numbers are placed within their own cellular codes (usually +79...) like in Europe, but some numbers do really have local numbers, as if they were fixed. However, most of them have aliases placed in +79..., so a local number is just a sort of additional bonus from the technical point of view. Users cannot actually distinguish a local fixed number from a cellular local number, even though sometimes it's possible (for example, +78129... is usually a cellular placed in St.Petersburg regional code, but some other cellulars have +7812716... etc., and Moscow has no such the rule, there's real mess). So, they are going to declare a local cellular number to be an additional option which is a sort of permanent redirection from a local fixed virtual number to a cellular, so they might set a price for incoming calls to that number because this would be the redirection price, which would not be covered by the CPP rule. And, calls to the cellular number of the same SIM (i.e. +79... number) would still be free for the SIM's owner. And, surely, nobody here is going to specially bill calls to fixed number ranges, because this would be really crazy, this would kill the billing systems all around Russia.