Telecommunications market in Russia - what, where, how, how much
It so happened that I have long been in the market for highly-highly-loaded projects and communications.
Did those. part (NDA already removed, right?) begun, mamba, badoo, innova, many others.
Now - badoo and DI are favorite companies. Although - badoo is old but indestructible love, DI is something for exUSSR - never seen before.
')
Badoo - we finally blew up the market in Europe, the USA and Latin America (> 100 million users - I really enjoy being part of the process).
DI - we will soon crush the CIS market, but we must clearly understand where and under what conditions we will give our traffic.
It is now about one of the pressing problems - communication.
In fact, this is a set of some subjective theses that might help someone, and anger someone ...
Everything written below is deep IMHO.
The communications market in Russia is what happened in the west about 10-15 years ago - it is time for wild rules, competition and muddy water in which a fish is caught.
All over the world there is an obvious separation of telecom operators into classes (tier) - 1,2,3 ...
Operators of the same level usually exchange traffic for free among themselves and sell it to lower-level ones, buying from their superiors (if any).
Tier-1 is the one on which the Internet rests, tobish inter-continental global operators with optics (usually its own) at the bottom of the oceans and terabits of traffic. Carry maximum costs and have maximum income. Usually working with clients through downstream operators, but in exceptional cases (usually hundreds of megabits) they sell traffic directly.
Approximate global prices for traffic - about 27 euros for megabits per head and with knockout talents - about 7-9 euros per megabyte. In the US, almost the same but prices in dollars.
The remark is that at the operator level there is practically no concept of “pay per gigabyte payment,” this is already tier-3 that usually sucks “suckers” - to end users.
There is a channel - load it at least 100%. In Russia, the remark does not always work, there are the most wild and unusual forms of levying bribes.
A striking example of tier-1 is Level3, GlobalCrossing, Telefonica, and so on.
(original - here )
Tier-2 are usually “national” operators at the level of a country or a group of countries in a region (a vivid example is Rostelecom or Transtelecom, which have their connectivity across the CIS territory), which, in order to communicate with other countries or try to make direct connections / IX connections with other tier- 2 (in other countries), or buy connectivity worldwide from tier-1, or (most often) have some kind of “mix”.
Prices common for the CIS market are about 300 rubles per megabit, with skills and abilities to negotiate about 100 rubles - with radically prevailing traffic within the region (tobish for the most part to remain inside the operator’s own infrastructure), otherwise the client gets tier-2 the operator is forced to pay the tier-1 operator and the price increases accordingly.
If we talk about the scenario - for example, at 80 gigabits of traffic (which is more than achievable for our project in the first six months) - taking into account the fact that we will merge 50% on different IXs - it will be about two million dollars a year.
Tier-3 and others - lower level (ala "UralSvyazInform" which covers Siberia or "DalSvyaz" in the Far East)
Prices range from free (within the network) to very expensive (covering the costs of higher-level operators).
Operators have established relationships and they usually change traffic on some conditions (those same points IX ).
Somewhere there are strict rules / laws (Europe) - if you are at IX, then you give IX participants access to their networks for free (which is why during the next peering wars in Russia, traffic begins to run through Europe), somewhere the relationship is mostly just business logic is regulated (as in the USA), somewhere (as in Russia and the CIS) - a complex mixture of business, lawlessness, personal relationships and other things.
For Russia / CIS, the main point is MSK-IX, where a turbulent life takes place, and the traffic on MSK-IX is growing very fast (until recently it was severely limited by the installed Cisco equipment, after the transition to Force10Networks this problem no longer exists) being extremely noticeable in comparison with even the largest European IX - see for yourself the annual chart (at the beginning).
There are “purely transit” operators of the RETN type (one of the most remarkable / sane companies that I have met during my professional career), which, although very important for the Russian communications market, unfortunately do not have real tier-2 or tier-1 status, but provide one of the best connectivity from Russia to Europe.
There are operators like "Synterra" (now Megafon) - who "neither fish nor meat" - do not have much real connectivity across the country, most of the "optics" are rented - but at the same time claim to be national in scope.
De facto, the former owners of Synterra sold the network to Megafon purely, leaving the serving network structure as a separate structure.
...
We speak further mainly of Russia.
As I mentioned, the market is now in a very interesting state and is changing literally every minute. Over the past few years, a lot has happened and the balance of power has changed dramatically.
Until recently, there were approximately two equal players on the local transit market (tier-2) - these are Rostelecom and Transtelecom, both semi-state structures, and they divided traffic approximately 50 to 50.
For the last two years, Transtelecom radically surrendered positions for a number of reasons, with which it is now trying to actively fight and that it is quite successful ...
Rostelecom has a fairly large number of subsidiaries (ISCs - Center Telecom, North-West Telecom, VolkTelecom, Wuxi, Sibirtelecom and Dalsvyaz), which the “Dad” from relatively recently began to impose traffic transmission only through itself (which is not done in practice, and almost all operators in Russia have additional inclusions - the so-called 2 or even 3 "legs").
RTOs are tier-3s, which are already going to the final subscriber.
De facto, the current alignment is such that 25% of the traffic of end users in exUSSR belongs to Rostelecom + RTOs.
Further "champions":
Ukrtelecom - 6-7%
Pchelain and Ertelecom - about 5%,
Moscow shpd - comstar and komkor - about 2% each,
The rest is less than one percent each.
Of the larger ones, NbN, NKS, Novotelecom, InterZet / Z-Telecom, TKT in St. Petersburg (these are 1% - 0.5% each)
Transtelecom is still very small, somewhere in the 30th place (but at the same time the average speed of the connected “physics” subscriber is 100 Mbps, and connected with fiber).
The share of the “big three” of mobile operators (mentioned by Pchelain with Megfon and MTS) is actively beginning to grow - they are all trying to build (or buy) their own national communications networks.
What is much more interesting to us is the tier-2 market, tobish a nationwide scale.
As already mentioned, TTK has lost ground and is trying to beat them back.
What happened?
In 2002, a number of “smart” people decided to organize a “cooperative” - an organized criminal group, “a separate peering group” - RTK (once again is a subsidiary of Rostelecom), TTK, Golden, MTU-Intel, Corbina, Comstar (Stream), Comcor (Acado ) and some more trivialities of the NbN-type pot-bellied group conspired and made a small party (traffic exchange is free only among themselves), putting all the rest “cancer” and starting (defacto) to extort money, blackmailing with the fact that they have the largest number of end subscribers and at the same time also transit channels .
As a non-advertising pause - working for Innova, I had a smart dialogue with one of the top managers of Golden Telecom.
The bottom line was simple: “I: we will generate dozens of gigabit traffic for you, it’s just profitable for you to get it for free! - Sudak: “no, we will milk the subscribers and you will pay us for having access to our subscribers” - I: “You don’t understand - I’ll launch 10 gigabits via Frankfurt instead of a direct link, and put your Western channels, besides the fact that you will be very expensive ... "- Sudak:" I do not care, you still will pay us money. "
What do you think? BGP, magic powder, juniper srx 5600, and we (golden / corbin / others) were fucked with kind smiles. And still have. Good conquers evil.
This period is also characterized by the flourishing of “pirate links”, when small managers in member companies of an organized criminal group made “left” inclusions (without introducing them into billing and buying up “their” engineers), and received a reward on on a regular basis (usually 2-5 thousand dollars a month, with the official price of $ 5-15 k and above).
There were wild situations when a manager who made such a pirate link had long since quit, no one gets paid for it - but everything continues to work for years.
It clearly characterizes the order in the structures of the organized criminal group - de facto, theft and slovenly, coupled with extreme short-sightedness of management.
Operators that were not included in the organized criminal group were forced (due to the wild prices for connection to the operators of the organized criminal group) to pass traffic through the western IX (due to the above-mentioned legislative regulations in the European Union), because of what the wild situation could be observed for years from Russia to Russia (or even Moscow to Moscow) went through Stockholm / Frankfurt / Amstrédam / London (the largest European IX) only because financially (but not logically) it was more profitable - sometimes the companies' routers stood a few meters from each other, but traffic I walked thousands of miles between them.
At the time of its creation, the organized criminal group seemed like a brilliant idea and even brought its temporary fruits to the creators - but in a slightly longer term it turned out to be a real dead end - as (in private conversations) the top managers of some of the participants mentioned, he practically outdated himself in 2003-2004, while continuing to exist with it until now (2011).
Millions of subscribers suffered, operators lost hundreds of millions of dollars - but organized crime groups continued to exist due to the whims and lack of foresight of a number of top managers of companies cartel members ...
Relationships inside the cartel were also quite “uneven” - for example, in 2004, the RTCom abruptly “cut off” the speed in the direction of the TTK (tobish the two largest players in exUSSR quarreled), but after a series of backstage fights everything again settled down - at least the peering was not broken ...
I note a very important thing - TTC and Rostelecom, with all their “disassembly” - actively exchange “optics” with each other and are very tightly connected.
Everything is gradually changing, as is the management of companies.
Smoothly, many participants of an organized criminal group realized that the “peer-to-peer group” had outlived itself, and began to think about how to earn money by commerce, but not by extortion.
Rostelecom "suddenly" drew attention to their RTOs (ordered them to let traffic through themselves), began to connect the largest (most important - "VKontakte") content generators (tobish those who generate large traffic, mostly video and music), and trying to monopolize the market (total traffic only Rostelecom goes to hundreds of gigabits already).
He also provoked another peer-to-peer war (when VK on (probably) stolen content) scored its “almost one-hundred-gigabit” - Rostelecom left the organized criminal group, while actually leaving the “barter” relationship with the same TTC.
At the same time, Rostelecom understands that VK is not eternal - the trends are clear to everyone, and the fact that unlicensed content has a very limited period of existence even in Russia and the CIS - this is understandable to almost any market professional - we have active searches for other traffic generators, while continuing to manifest habits of the past and periods to call fairly wild rates for traffic (however, in Russia you can always negotiate )
TTK in this situation behaves reasonably enough - changing almost the entire management and those. the team, he is actively trying to regain his position and offers very favorable terms of cooperation (with high quality), in addition, quickly increasing the capacity and reliability of the network.
Again, the market is actively supported by well-founded rumors that OPG-2 will soon be (its composition is changing quite a lot after the first organized crime group), and this could be another blow to the Russian Internet.
...
I thank all my colleagues “in the workshop” (regardless of the company), among whom I would like to highlight Volodin Dmitry - one of the best specialists in Russia and the CIS (connectivity, juniper, force10, cisco, and much more) and the developer / ideologist of the project NOCProject (which is already used by very large operators / providers around the world), as well as my IT “angels” company Zycko UK.
Regards, Maxim Shaposhnikov, shapa@me.com.
Did those. part (NDA already removed, right?) begun, mamba, badoo, innova, many others.
Now - badoo and DI are favorite companies. Although - badoo is old but indestructible love, DI is something for exUSSR - never seen before.
')
Badoo - we finally blew up the market in Europe, the USA and Latin America (> 100 million users - I really enjoy being part of the process).
DI - we will soon crush the CIS market, but we must clearly understand where and under what conditions we will give our traffic.
It is now about one of the pressing problems - communication.
In fact, this is a set of some subjective theses that might help someone, and anger someone ...
Everything written below is deep IMHO.
The communications market in Russia is what happened in the west about 10-15 years ago - it is time for wild rules, competition and muddy water in which a fish is caught.
All over the world there is an obvious separation of telecom operators into classes (tier) - 1,2,3 ...
Operators of the same level usually exchange traffic for free among themselves and sell it to lower-level ones, buying from their superiors (if any).
Tier-1 is the one on which the Internet rests, tobish inter-continental global operators with optics (usually its own) at the bottom of the oceans and terabits of traffic. Carry maximum costs and have maximum income. Usually working with clients through downstream operators, but in exceptional cases (usually hundreds of megabits) they sell traffic directly.
Approximate global prices for traffic - about 27 euros for megabits per head and with knockout talents - about 7-9 euros per megabyte. In the US, almost the same but prices in dollars.
The remark is that at the operator level there is practically no concept of “pay per gigabyte payment,” this is already tier-3 that usually sucks “suckers” - to end users.
There is a channel - load it at least 100%. In Russia, the remark does not always work, there are the most wild and unusual forms of levying bribes.
A striking example of tier-1 is Level3, GlobalCrossing, Telefonica, and so on.
(original - here )
Tier-2 are usually “national” operators at the level of a country or a group of countries in a region (a vivid example is Rostelecom or Transtelecom, which have their connectivity across the CIS territory), which, in order to communicate with other countries or try to make direct connections / IX connections with other tier- 2 (in other countries), or buy connectivity worldwide from tier-1, or (most often) have some kind of “mix”.
Prices common for the CIS market are about 300 rubles per megabit, with skills and abilities to negotiate about 100 rubles - with radically prevailing traffic within the region (tobish for the most part to remain inside the operator’s own infrastructure), otherwise the client gets tier-2 the operator is forced to pay the tier-1 operator and the price increases accordingly.
If we talk about the scenario - for example, at 80 gigabits of traffic (which is more than achievable for our project in the first six months) - taking into account the fact that we will merge 50% on different IXs - it will be about two million dollars a year.
Tier-3 and others - lower level (ala "UralSvyazInform" which covers Siberia or "DalSvyaz" in the Far East)
Prices range from free (within the network) to very expensive (covering the costs of higher-level operators).
Operators have established relationships and they usually change traffic on some conditions (those same points IX ).
Somewhere there are strict rules / laws (Europe) - if you are at IX, then you give IX participants access to their networks for free (which is why during the next peering wars in Russia, traffic begins to run through Europe), somewhere the relationship is mostly just business logic is regulated (as in the USA), somewhere (as in Russia and the CIS) - a complex mixture of business, lawlessness, personal relationships and other things.
For Russia / CIS, the main point is MSK-IX, where a turbulent life takes place, and the traffic on MSK-IX is growing very fast (until recently it was severely limited by the installed Cisco equipment, after the transition to Force10Networks this problem no longer exists) being extremely noticeable in comparison with even the largest European IX - see for yourself the annual chart (at the beginning).
There are “purely transit” operators of the RETN type (one of the most remarkable / sane companies that I have met during my professional career), which, although very important for the Russian communications market, unfortunately do not have real tier-2 or tier-1 status, but provide one of the best connectivity from Russia to Europe.
There are operators like "Synterra" (now Megafon) - who "neither fish nor meat" - do not have much real connectivity across the country, most of the "optics" are rented - but at the same time claim to be national in scope.
De facto, the former owners of Synterra sold the network to Megafon purely, leaving the serving network structure as a separate structure.
...
We speak further mainly of Russia.
As I mentioned, the market is now in a very interesting state and is changing literally every minute. Over the past few years, a lot has happened and the balance of power has changed dramatically.
Until recently, there were approximately two equal players on the local transit market (tier-2) - these are Rostelecom and Transtelecom, both semi-state structures, and they divided traffic approximately 50 to 50.
For the last two years, Transtelecom radically surrendered positions for a number of reasons, with which it is now trying to actively fight and that it is quite successful ...
Rostelecom has a fairly large number of subsidiaries (ISCs - Center Telecom, North-West Telecom, VolkTelecom, Wuxi, Sibirtelecom and Dalsvyaz), which the “Dad” from relatively recently began to impose traffic transmission only through itself (which is not done in practice, and almost all operators in Russia have additional inclusions - the so-called 2 or even 3 "legs").
RTOs are tier-3s, which are already going to the final subscriber.
De facto, the current alignment is such that 25% of the traffic of end users in exUSSR belongs to Rostelecom + RTOs.
Further "champions":
Ukrtelecom - 6-7%
Pchelain and Ertelecom - about 5%,
Moscow shpd - comstar and komkor - about 2% each,
The rest is less than one percent each.
Of the larger ones, NbN, NKS, Novotelecom, InterZet / Z-Telecom, TKT in St. Petersburg (these are 1% - 0.5% each)
Transtelecom is still very small, somewhere in the 30th place (but at the same time the average speed of the connected “physics” subscriber is 100 Mbps, and connected with fiber).
The share of the “big three” of mobile operators (mentioned by Pchelain with Megfon and MTS) is actively beginning to grow - they are all trying to build (or buy) their own national communications networks.
What is much more interesting to us is the tier-2 market, tobish a nationwide scale.
As already mentioned, TTK has lost ground and is trying to beat them back.
What happened?
In 2002, a number of “smart” people decided to organize a “cooperative” - an organized criminal group, “a separate peering group” - RTK (once again is a subsidiary of Rostelecom), TTK, Golden, MTU-Intel, Corbina, Comstar (Stream), Comcor (Acado ) and some more trivialities of the NbN-type pot-bellied group conspired and made a small party (traffic exchange is free only among themselves), putting all the rest “cancer” and starting (defacto) to extort money, blackmailing with the fact that they have the largest number of end subscribers and at the same time also transit channels .
As a non-advertising pause - working for Innova, I had a smart dialogue with one of the top managers of Golden Telecom.
The bottom line was simple: “I: we will generate dozens of gigabit traffic for you, it’s just profitable for you to get it for free! - Sudak: “no, we will milk the subscribers and you will pay us for having access to our subscribers” - I: “You don’t understand - I’ll launch 10 gigabits via Frankfurt instead of a direct link, and put your Western channels, besides the fact that you will be very expensive ... "- Sudak:" I do not care, you still will pay us money. "
What do you think? BGP, magic powder, juniper srx 5600, and we (golden / corbin / others) were fucked with kind smiles. And still have. Good conquers evil.
This period is also characterized by the flourishing of “pirate links”, when small managers in member companies of an organized criminal group made “left” inclusions (without introducing them into billing and buying up “their” engineers), and received a reward on on a regular basis (usually 2-5 thousand dollars a month, with the official price of $ 5-15 k and above).
There were wild situations when a manager who made such a pirate link had long since quit, no one gets paid for it - but everything continues to work for years.
It clearly characterizes the order in the structures of the organized criminal group - de facto, theft and slovenly, coupled with extreme short-sightedness of management.
Operators that were not included in the organized criminal group were forced (due to the wild prices for connection to the operators of the organized criminal group) to pass traffic through the western IX (due to the above-mentioned legislative regulations in the European Union), because of what the wild situation could be observed for years from Russia to Russia (or even Moscow to Moscow) went through Stockholm / Frankfurt / Amstrédam / London (the largest European IX) only because financially (but not logically) it was more profitable - sometimes the companies' routers stood a few meters from each other, but traffic I walked thousands of miles between them.
At the time of its creation, the organized criminal group seemed like a brilliant idea and even brought its temporary fruits to the creators - but in a slightly longer term it turned out to be a real dead end - as (in private conversations) the top managers of some of the participants mentioned, he practically outdated himself in 2003-2004, while continuing to exist with it until now (2011).
Millions of subscribers suffered, operators lost hundreds of millions of dollars - but organized crime groups continued to exist due to the whims and lack of foresight of a number of top managers of companies cartel members ...
Relationships inside the cartel were also quite “uneven” - for example, in 2004, the RTCom abruptly “cut off” the speed in the direction of the TTK (tobish the two largest players in exUSSR quarreled), but after a series of backstage fights everything again settled down - at least the peering was not broken ...
I note a very important thing - TTC and Rostelecom, with all their “disassembly” - actively exchange “optics” with each other and are very tightly connected.
Everything is gradually changing, as is the management of companies.
Smoothly, many participants of an organized criminal group realized that the “peer-to-peer group” had outlived itself, and began to think about how to earn money by commerce, but not by extortion.
Rostelecom "suddenly" drew attention to their RTOs (ordered them to let traffic through themselves), began to connect the largest (most important - "VKontakte") content generators (tobish those who generate large traffic, mostly video and music), and trying to monopolize the market (total traffic only Rostelecom goes to hundreds of gigabits already).
He also provoked another peer-to-peer war (when VK on (probably) stolen content) scored its “almost one-hundred-gigabit” - Rostelecom left the organized criminal group, while actually leaving the “barter” relationship with the same TTC.
At the same time, Rostelecom understands that VK is not eternal - the trends are clear to everyone, and the fact that unlicensed content has a very limited period of existence even in Russia and the CIS - this is understandable to almost any market professional - we have active searches for other traffic generators, while continuing to manifest habits of the past and periods to call fairly wild rates for traffic (however, in Russia you can always negotiate )
TTK in this situation behaves reasonably enough - changing almost the entire management and those. the team, he is actively trying to regain his position and offers very favorable terms of cooperation (with high quality), in addition, quickly increasing the capacity and reliability of the network.
Again, the market is actively supported by well-founded rumors that OPG-2 will soon be (its composition is changing quite a lot after the first organized crime group), and this could be another blow to the Russian Internet.
...
I thank all my colleagues “in the workshop” (regardless of the company), among whom I would like to highlight Volodin Dmitry - one of the best specialists in Russia and the CIS (connectivity, juniper, force10, cisco, and much more) and the developer / ideologist of the project NOCProject (which is already used by very large operators / providers around the world), as well as my IT “angels” company Zycko UK.
Regards, Maxim Shaposhnikov, shapa@me.com.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/113086/
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