Foreign travelers hooked on cellular telephony find Russia an expensive place to visit. Moscow ranks as one of the most costly locations in the world to use a mobile telephone. However, if the need dictates, then choose your operator carefully since a mistake can be even more costly.


Moscow Cellular, with around 10,000 subscribers, is the largest cellular network in the capital. It offers the best coverage and the most additional services like voice mail, roaming agreements (the ability to use your handset in other cities) and fax or modem adapters for cellular telephones. A minus is that trying to call a Moscow Cellular telephone from a regular city number can be problematic at times. If you expect to get a lot of Moscow calls, Moscow Cellular suggests you pay an extra $1,500 for an additional city number to enable you to better receive calls from within the capital.


The second largest network in Moscow is Beeline, with about 6,000 subscribers. Beeline has a reputation for better line quality but has a slightly smaller coverage and it works out to be more expensive to use than Moscow Cellular. Beeline tends to be more Russian-oriented than Moscow Cellular, with price lists and brochures available only in Russian. Talking to Beeline gave me the strong impression that wanting to hook up to their network (and paying about $3,000) involved them doing me a big favor.


Moscow's third major network, Mobile Tele Systems (MTS), is a joint venture between the Moscow telephone company MGTS, the Russian company ASVT, France Telecom, and Germany's Siemens and DeTeMobil. Although around 1,700 users are now connected to the network, there has still not been an official "launch." The launch date, originally July 1994, was postponed several times, and even today MTS still needs to receive several licenses from the Communications Ministry before it is able to offer a full commercial service.


What this means in practice is difficult to determine, but it does create a worrying air of uncertainty for potential MTS customers. Perhaps more worrying is that at the Svyaz '94 trade show, when the initial launch date was announced, there was a large DBT Telekom stand full of flashy German marketing materials and slick German managers. At Svyaz '95 this year, the MTS stand was small, the staff was all Russian, the literature was humorously amateurish and poorly translated into English from Russian, and there was not even a whiff of German slickness. Could this be a suggestion of how the network is going to operate?


There are two other networks in Moscow, AMT and Altai. AMT is based on an early NMT standard which uses handsets with incredibly heavy battery packs. Little is heard from AMT, but the fact that their 1994 advertising literature still failed to acknowledge the end of the Soviet Union hints at the extent to which they are a serious player in the market. Moscow's Altai network is based on an older, pre-cellular technology and is virtually at full capacity.


Operators offer a range of payment schemes which juggle initial hook-up fees against various volumes of guaranteed usage.


?Equipment: With the exception of MTS, you must buy your telephone handset and any additional battery packs, antenna, adapters, etc. from the operator or one of its authorized agents. Prices vary for each model on each network. Beeline, for example, offers two options at $2,000 or $1,700. Moscow Cellular is a little cheaper.


?Connection: All operators charge a connection fee. This can vary from $300 to $1,500.


?Deposit: Many operators ask for an initial deposit of several hundred U.S. dollars as security against you running up huge bills in your first week. This is sometimes structured as a large advanced payment for airtime.


?Monthly charges: Some operators charge a monthly fee called line rental. On top of this you pay extra for international access, voice mail, call forwarding, conference calls, itemized billing and roaming.


?Airtime: You pay for outgoing and incoming calls on Russian cellular networks. Recognizing that some people want only to be reachable, some operators sell an incoming-call-only package. You pay roughly 50 cents per minute for all calls and then extra for inter-city or international calls.





Robert Farish is the editor of Computer Business Russia. Fax: 198-6207, Internet e-mail: farish@glas.apc.org