ESCALATION OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS IN RUSSIA

Abstract

The article is devoted to identifying the directions of development of telecommunications in Russia. The decade of 2010–2019 is considered, during which the infrastructure of the digital economy based on the Internet access and mobile communications platforms has been primarily developed. The appearance of documentary telecommunications services in the economy – its main component of Internet access services – allowed to remove restrictions on access to telephone communications, television, and radio communications. The methodological basis of this research is the theory and methodology of the regional economy. The analysis of telecommunications infrastructure resources showed the necessity for their separate accounting for the population and legal entities. The research method, a generalization of the available empirical facts, allowed to define the qualitative changes that had occurred in the structure of telecommunications services. On the basis of statistical data, the dynamics of development has been examined, and the differentiation of service consumption by the population and legal entities in all regions of the country within the time frame has been conducted. The quantitative analysis helped to identify four qualitative changes in telecommunications over the course of the decade. All of them are associated with gradual development and introduction of Internet technologies. At first, traditional telephony in long-distance communications was replaced by IP telephony. Then the service of fixed Internet access even more supplanted traditional telephony in local communications. The development of mobile Internet access led to its predominance in comparison with mobile telephony, and then to an excess of the consumption level over the consumption level of the fixed Internet. The study made it possible to determine the directions of the fields of applying of financial efforts, capital investments and the direction of the telecommunications development by expanding access to the mobile Internet, including through the modernization of the network of base stations of cellular communications in each of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation.