Belarus and Russia officially switched to reduced roaming tariffs
Since September 1, Belarus and Russia have officially switched to “comfortable” roaming. The decision to end the experience of interconnect tariffs for roaming traffic on a commercial basis of the Union State and the beginning of the application of comfortable tariffs on an ongoing basis was made in August at the level of the High Level Group of the Council of Ministers of the Union State. And now it has come true. What exactly has changed for citizens?
There is no talk of a complete cancellation of roaming yet. It will be considered finally canceled from the moment when the cost of an incoming call will officially be zero rubles. In the meantime, mobile calls between countries have fallen in price dozens of times.
Let us remind you that the work on canceling roaming on the territory of the Union State has been going on for several years. The idea was put forward by the speaker of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation Valentina Matvienko – back in 2017 at the IV Forum of the Regions of Belarus and Russia. At that time, it was quite difficult to implement, different principles of organizing mobile communications were in force in Russia and Belarus. In particular, there was no interregional roaming in Belarus, but in Russia it was. The first step was to abolish roaming in Russia, both domestic and national. After this happened on June 1, 2019, Belarusians and Russians began to look forward to the cancellation of roaming in the territory of the entire Union State. When mobile operators in Belarus had more expensive calls to Europe than calls to Europe.
The first significant result was the signing of a roadmap in 2019, which established measures to change the conditions for interaction between telecom operators, anti-monopoly response measures, as well as measures to identify and suppress fraud in telecommunication networks. In accordance with this document, the fee for incoming roaming calls must be canceled no later than September 2020. However, due to the pandemic, the dates have shifted, and from November 1, 2020, an experiment was launched to reduce roaming tariffs between Russia and Belarus. But this was already noticeable: for example, for Tele2, the cost of 1 MB of Internet traffic was 3.5 rubles instead of 25 rubles, the cost of incoming and outgoing traffic was 3.5 rubles per minute instead of the 15 rubles previously in effect. Sending one SMS to a subscriber’s number in the Russian Federation bypasses the subscriber 1.95 rubles instead of 6 rubles.
In Megafon, starting from November 1, 2020, incoming calls cost 3.5 rubles per minute, and outgoing calls to Russia – 5 rubles per minute. Previously, incoming and outgoing services cost 99 rubles per minute. The prices of the Beeline and MTS operators also became loyal.
Representatives of the “Big Four” of Russian mobile operators have already announced that the experiment is successful and are moving the test mode into a permanent phase. Some operators note that the traffic of subscribers with per-minute tariffication has increased several times since November 1, 2020, when the experiment began.
It is expected that the complete abolition of roaming within the Union State will take place by the beginning of 2022. As stated back in April 2021 following a meeting of the High-level Group, State Secretary of the Union State Dmitry Mezentsev, “… calls to each other from one and the other country. “
Want to know more about the Union State? Subscribe to our news on social networks.