FAS may initiate an antitrust investigation against telecom operators due to roaming tariffs

The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) continues to work on the abolition of roaming in Russia. At the same time, the activity of the regulator is at a stage that anticipates an antitrust investigation against mobile operators. According to Vedomosti, relevant information appeared in the minutes of the FAS meeting with operators and departments on March 30, 2017. The FAS plans to start preparing for the investigation, since the regulator is forced by "a sluggish negotiation process and the lack of specific solutions to reduce tariffs for traveling around Russia."



Meeting on the abolition of roaming with the participation of FAS is not the first. At the previous meeting on November 29 last year, mobile operators committed themselves to developing tariff proposals. Regulators have promised to develop appropriate measures to amend the legislation. Unfortunately, all these intentions remained on paper. So, already on March 30 of this year, the deputy head of FAS, Anatoly Golomolzin, said that there are practically no changes that allow subscribers to use home services in roaming. On the part of the operators, there were no proposals for new tariffs.



It is worth noting that in order to successfully work on reducing roaming tariffs, operators had to send each other offers on lowering tariffs for mutual settlement services. Roaming prices for subscribers largely depend on this, but in the end, no action was taken by operators in this direction.

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The operators themselves, in particular, Megafon and MTS believe that they are taking sufficient measures to reduce prices in roaming. A MTS representative claims that the company already now has about 80% of subscribers who travel to other cities, talking at a price as close as possible to “home” tariffs. Now MTS is preparing a proposal with per-second billing of calls while traveling in Russia, which will reduce communication costs, and quite significantly. Similarly, the situation in the "Megaphone". In any case, representatives of this company think so. Yulia Dorokhina, a representative of MegaFon, says that now more than 80% of MegaFon subscribers save on traveling around Russia using special roaming tariffs. For example, in most tariff packages the cost of calls and mobile Internet outside the “home” does not change.



T2 RTK Holding (Tele2 brand) announced that the cost of the company's intranet roaming is economically justified. Konstantin Prokshin, the operator’s spokesman, says that minutes, gigabytes and sms are spent on part of the tariffs for traveling in Russia from packages, so the subscriber does not incur additional costs. Plus, for some tariffs, the preferential cost of calls is relevant.



Only VimpelCom declares its intention to develop and submit its proposals for roaming tariffs to the FAS. The operator believes that the reduction in prices on trips around Russia is quite possible, but here the problem is in the cost of ending a call - this indicator has a strong influence on pricing in roaming. It is worth recalling that in December, VimpelCom CEO Schell Johnsen announced his support for the abolition of intranet roaming in Russia. But this requires a reduction in tariffs for which operators pay each other for the completion of calls.



Now several operators, including VimpelCom, Megafon and T2 RTK Holding, deal with the issue of reducing the cost of call completion. According to analytical agencies JPMorgan and VTB Capital, VimpelCom’s offer is unlikely to be supported by Megafon and MTS. By the way, in January of this year, FAS filed a case against MegaFon for raising tariffs for international roaming.