Internet in Belarus
In early September 2013, a petition was initiated, directed to the head of Beltelecom RUE Sergei Popkov, as well as to a number of other persons (Nikolai Kochkin, director of the National Center for Traffic Exchange National Unitary Enterprise, head of the Operational Analytical Center under the President of the Republic of Belarus Sergei Shpigun), demanding ... improve the quality of Internet access services.
What is the problem of the Internet in Belarus? The problem lies in the fact that access to international Internet channels is shared by 2 state-owned enterprises: the National Traffic Exchange Center (NTEC) and Beltelecom (also providing Internet access along with other providers under the “byfly” brand). Help from Wikipedia :
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From the existence of such a state monopoly, the terrible quality of access to the Internet and its unfairly high cost quite naturally follow.
For example, unlimited wired (we’ll talk about it later) Internet access with a 4096/512 kbit / s reception / return rate will cost € 10 per month.
It is clear that the petition is only a tool to draw attention to the problem. At the moment (09/07/2014), the petition has collected 21,500+ signatures of Internet users, most of whom live in Belarus.
On the petition page you can find the comments of the signatories. Here are some of them:
A year has passed and it was decided to check whether Beltelecom has changed anything in the quality of access to the Internet.
The survey involved 2130 Internet users who have signed the petition. Of these, 90% use the services of the byfly provider, which was emphasized at the start of the petition. Most Internet users in Belarus are customers of this particular provider.
I will give some results of the survey:
Not to mention the fact that access to unwanted power resources is periodically blocked (sometimes with their blocking by Rostelecom), many users are faced with the fact that they ... have been banned from Google! Are you kidding?
Lucky when Google asks for a simple captcha:
However, sometimes you may not be lucky and access to Google will be completely closed:
This happens because byfly uses such a scheme for distributing IP addresses, when one IP corresponds to up to hundreds of machines, some of which can be part of a botnet and send spam. By the way, Belarus is one of the world leaders in spamming:
When contacting support, experts either blatantly lie (“your computer is infected with a virus, I can’t do anything”), or provide generally reliable information (“Google blocks access, we are not responsible for this”). For ordinary users, however, this does not help. By the way about the support service, 65% of the respondents have contacted the support service ever. However, only 13% are completely satisfied with the solution of their problems:
This indicates both the extremely low level of technical support work and the fact that the byfly provider is “problematic” together with Beltelekom.
Obviously, the way out of the situation is demonopolization of the market, because competition in general leads to an increase in the quality of services. But how to achieve it?
In the comments to the survey, I found only one constructive proposal: " change the president " ...
UPD: Added poll. The question should be understood broadly, i.e. The “quality of access services” includes the quality / price ratio of the provided access to the Internet, the presence of choice in the market, and the quality of the technical support service.
What is the problem of the Internet in Belarus? The problem lies in the fact that access to international Internet channels is shared by 2 state-owned enterprises: the National Traffic Exchange Center (NTEC) and Beltelecom (also providing Internet access along with other providers under the “byfly” brand). Help from Wikipedia :
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Until April 1, 2012, only one company in the country - the state-owned enterprise Beltelecom (the official current name is “Beltelecom Republican Unitary Telecommunication Enterprise”) had the technical capability and the monopoly right to organize interconnection of providers in the country and provide access to international telecommunication providers . Since April 1, 2012, Beltelecom provides interconnection of provider networks within the country along with the newly created National Center for the Exchange of Traffic (NTSOT)
From the existence of such a state monopoly, the terrible quality of access to the Internet and its unfairly high cost quite naturally follow.
For example, unlimited wired (we’ll talk about it later) Internet access with a 4096/512 kbit / s reception / return rate will cost € 10 per month.
It is clear that the petition is only a tool to draw attention to the problem. At the moment (09/07/2014), the petition has collected 21,500+ signatures of Internet users, most of whom live in Belarus.
On the petition page you can find the comments of the signatories. Here are some of them:
Payment for services does not correspond to quality. Beltelecom's monopoly makes it impossible to use better services.
For the money we pay for the so-called “high-speed Internet”, it could have been at least just high-speed!
Tired of the constant problems with the Internet.
Changes require our hearts.
Changes require our eyes.
In our laughter and in our tears,
And in the pulsations of the veins:
Change
We are waiting for changes.
A year has passed and it was decided to check whether Beltelecom has changed anything in the quality of access to the Internet.
The survey involved 2130 Internet users who have signed the petition. Of these, 90% use the services of the byfly provider, which was emphasized at the start of the petition. Most Internet users in Belarus are customers of this particular provider.
I will give some results of the survey:
Not to mention the fact that access to unwanted power resources is periodically blocked (sometimes with their blocking by Rostelecom), many users are faced with the fact that they ... have been banned from Google! Are you kidding?
Lucky when Google asks for a simple captcha:
However, sometimes you may not be lucky and access to Google will be completely closed:
This happens because byfly uses such a scheme for distributing IP addresses, when one IP corresponds to up to hundreds of machines, some of which can be part of a botnet and send spam. By the way, Belarus is one of the world leaders in spamming:
When contacting support, experts either blatantly lie (“your computer is infected with a virus, I can’t do anything”), or provide generally reliable information (“Google blocks access, we are not responsible for this”). For ordinary users, however, this does not help. By the way about the support service, 65% of the respondents have contacted the support service ever. However, only 13% are completely satisfied with the solution of their problems:
This indicates both the extremely low level of technical support work and the fact that the byfly provider is “problematic” together with Beltelekom.
Obviously, the way out of the situation is demonopolization of the market, because competition in general leads to an increase in the quality of services. But how to achieve it?
In the comments to the survey, I found only one constructive proposal: " change the president " ...
UPD: Added poll. The question should be understood broadly, i.e. The “quality of access services” includes the quality / price ratio of the provided access to the Internet, the presence of choice in the market, and the quality of the technical support service.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/235927/
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