Evolution of telecommunications in Russia

The current status of Russia's telecommunications infrastructure does not correspond to the country's increasing demands. The creation of a commercial digital overlay network is apparently the only possible solution to provide modern telecommunications services. This article describes the following aspects of the evolution of telecommunications in Russia: a classification of the main specific features of the existing telecommunications networks; an analysis of the telecommunications statistics and forecasting of the main characteristics; likely future scenarios of the evolving telecommunications system; and the main telecommunications projects that will be carried out in the nearest future. Until now, the public switched telephone network (PSTN), a unique system providing basic dialogue services (speech, data transmission, etc.), was the single solution to provide national telecommunications. For this reason, we first describe the main features of the Russian national PSTN.<>