MTS asks the state to protect itself from Skype

MTS sent a request to Roskomnadzor and the Ministry of Communications in which it asks to pay attention to the activities of OTT services (Over The Top services delivering the signal via the Internet channel). Such projects increasingly compete with operators, but their activities are not regulated at all. MTS would be happy if the regulator considered the issue of compliance of Skype and similar companies with Russian licensing requirements: it is necessary to determine their status as market participants. Indeed, in fact, Internet service providers, without investing in communication infrastructure, use networks, in the construction of which operators have invested huge amounts of money.



MTS is supported in MegaFon and VimpelCom, but no such requests were sent.
Representatives of the owners of the largest OTT services - Microsoft (Skype) and Google (Google Talk) do not comment.

Roskomnadzor has so far refrained from commenting on this situation.
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The issue of OTT services was raised at the FAS expert council. FAS expressed the idea of ​​filtering traffic - operators could rate Skype and similar services as a separate service or limit speeds when using them.