Brother, can you spare a line?


As I am sure many small companies in Moscow have discovered, getting extra telephone lines is only easy if you are in a prime location or have ridiculously large amounts of money to spend on telecommunications. Unable to guarantee operators four-figure telephone bills each month, small companies like us find ourselves begging for local telephone lines.


Moscow's telephone lines are notoriously poor. Exchanges that should have been replaced decades ago are connected by old, badly-laid cables, which run into badly-wired buildings. Since the city has no "backbone" of trunk lines every single local exchange must be linked to every other. Congestion is therefore common on many exchanges when you are trying to reach certain parts of the city or attempt to make international or intercity calls at peak times of the day. Partly because of the age of much of the network, local lines are also in short supply.


Large (i.e., rich) users are usually able to pay a telecommunications company -- usually joint ventures -- to install extra city lines in most places in central Moscow (within the Garden Ring road) and at a selection of locations outside (especially down Leninsky Prospekt in the south or up Leningradsky Prospekt in the north). For small companies, however, it is difficult to persuade anyone to provide you with extra lines unless your location is convenient or you have lots of money to spend.


When you fail with these telecommunications joint ventures, your only choice is then to look to the state to provide you with new lines.


Moscow City Telephone Network, or MGTS, does not provide new telephone lines centrally but through its local telephone stations. Moscow is receiving relatively sustained investment in its telephone system and at several of the central exchanges (numbers starting with 9), as well as several exchanges in the new regions like Chertanovo and Mitino you are likely to be in luck with your request. In other areas the age of the local exchange can mean that there are simply no more spare numbers or extra capacity. This information, however, can be extracted only by visiting your local telephone station.


The telephone station is a real bastion of Soviet values. Expect to be shuffled from window to window and from office to office and be made to feel as if you are asking for a first-class ticket to the moon. It is inevitable that you will not be there at the right time when you first visit. Such organizations always have surreal working hours which differ from office to office within the same building.


Perhaps most fascinating about telephone stations is the way commercialization has been refracted through the prism of Soviet mentality. Although today no one gets a new telephone line without paying a lot for it, if you operate out of a residential building you still need to go through an elaborate ritual in which the station assesses how "deserving" you are of one. The first question we were asked by Comrade Deputy Manager of the Development Section at our local telephone station, was: "Do you live with any invalids or war veterans?" Only then, after shaking her head at the difficulties posed by our not being either crippled or geriatric, did Comrade Deputy Manager check to see if there were in fact any free lines available. A quick call to someone else in the building revealed that there were none.


This, however, is not the end of the story. Many of the successfully acquired MGTS city lines are obtained through private companies that are either very well-connected at the telephone stations or know who to bribe in the Moscow telephone bureaucracy. One company we spoke to claimed that it could get lines into our building from the reserve held by our telephone station (and any telephone station for that matter). Apparently this company does what the telephone stations -- for reasons of legality or stubbornness -- refuse to do. If we were to sign a contract with this firm, we would return to the telephone station with one of its representatives, fill out the relevant forms (and probably exchange a pleasant smile with Comrade Deputy Manager while we were there). The result would be a new city line within three weeks, no questions asked. The difference? A cool $4,500.





Robert Farish is the editor of Computer Business Russia, fax: 198-6207, Internet e-mail: farish@sovam.com.