Mobile Content Russia

One in four Muscovites accessing the internet at least once a month does so with the help of a mobile phone rather than a computer. Those are the findings of research conducted by TNS Gallup Media in June. Moscow's monthly internet audience (the number of people accessing the internet at least once during the course of a month) in June was 5.7 million people, while across Russia it was 24.5 million, says the research from TNS, which has been seen by Vedomosti. A 24.5-per-cent share of Moscow's monthly internet audience (1.4 million people) and 28.4 per cent of the Russian audience (7 million people) used a mobile phone (WAP or GPRS technologies) to access the internet, and the figures for those who did so every day or several times a week are 12 per cent and 15 per cent respectively. According to Inessa Ishunkina, who led the research, TNS conducted a telephone survey among 17,000 people living in 77 cities with a population of 100,000 or more.

The monthly audience for internet access via a mobile stood at 7 million people at the end of 2007 (almost double the figure at the end of 2006), while the market for the mobile transfer of data (using WAP, GPRS and other technologies) grew to 570m dollars (up 55 per cent), estimates Yuliya Fedorova, an analyst at the research firm iKS-Consulting. This estimate differs significantly from data provided by the mobile operators. Representatives of MTS, MegaFon and Skay Link [Skylink] maintain that 11 per cent (6.75 million), 15 per cent (5.8 million) and more than 50 per cent (320,000) of their subscribers respectively use their telephones to access the internet on a regular basis. If one relies on the data from these operators (VympelKom does not disclose this sort of information), then the mobile internet audience exceeds 13 million people. Ishunkina and Fedorova were unable to comment on this discrepancy in the figures.

According to data from iKS Consulting, by the end of 2007 5.6 million subscribers were using wired internet broadband, bringing the operators 2.12bn dollars. The income for MTS from mobile internet will grow by an average of 40 per cent a year, and, thanks to the launch of third-generation (3G) data transfer networks, growth rates will reach 65-70 per cent, says Yelena Kokhanovskaya, director of public relations at MTS. The company expects that by 2012 the market for mobile internet broadband will be worth 2-3.4bn dollars, and is counting on taking 38 per cent of that market, Kokhanovskaya adds. "It's convenient for people to use mobile internet, because it works everywhere," explains Yekaterina Osadchaya, press secretary at VympelKom. MegaFon, says its press secretary Tatyana Zvereva, is developing special offers in order to encourage mobile internet use. More than 80 per cent of Skylink's new subscribers are being placed specifically on tariffs which provide only for internet access, and the average volume of internet traffic per subscriber per month comes to 500 MB [megabytes], said Olga Pestereva, the company's director of public relations (the figure for the "big three" [MegaFon, MTS and VympelKom] is 100 MB, estimates MegaFon).

"Mobile internet access is a way of accessing the internet urgently, rather like mobile telephones were once used only for urgent calls because of the expense," believes Sergey Pridantsev, president of Komstar - United Telesystems [Russ: obedinennyye telesystemy] (which leads the Moscow market in fixed-line wired broadband internet access). Wired broadband internet access should be unlimited and its speed should be no less than 1.5 megabits per second; operators are not delivering this as yet, says Pridantsev. The upper speed limit on GPRS is 171.2 kilobits per second, while the EV-DO technology (which is used by Skylink) delivers speeds of up to 3.1 megabits per second to the subscriber. However, Skylink's unlimited tariffs are only available in the regions and are based on an assumption of limited access speed (less than one megabit per second), Pestereva acknowledges.

Report by Timofey Dzyadko and Aleksandra Kudryavtseva
Originally published by Vedomosti, Moscow, in Russian 22 Jul 08.