Crackly lines, call interruption and temperamental Internet connections are enough to convince anyone that ordinary local telephone lines in Moscow - mostly unmodernized since their installation in the Brezhnev era or much earlier - are not viable for business purposes.
This, combined with Russia's severe shortage of international lines at the start of the 1990s, prompted a gold rush by commercial telecommunications service providers in the last 10 years, bringing reliable phone, Internet and data transmission services to most buildings that let office space.
However, webs of cross-ownership between supposed competitors, non-transparent payment relationships with the city's privately controlled municipal phone company, the Moscow City Telephone Network, or MGTS, and effective monopolies in office complexes make it hard to judge whether customers are getting a square deal from the alternative operators, also known as overlay operators, commercial public networks, or competitive local exchange carriers. At least, customers are getting a squarer deal than they did a few years back.
Simon Baker, a telecommunications analyst at the DC Russia consultancy, said that usually when countries introduce competition, the new operators have to offer a service more cheaply than the incumbent, and all tariffs for interconnection with the public network are dictated by regulators.
"Here, the new companies did not come in to provide competition but to provide a service at all. And - typical for Russia in the early 1990s - they charged as much as they wanted - several dollars a minute to call abroad from some hotels, for example," he said.
But lower demand after the 1998 crisis and increasing competition have forced the companies to curb their appetites and to take an interest in customers whose telecom traffic potential would have seemed too modest a few years ago.
"The big clients are mainly all taken, so competition on the corporate market is very tough," said Dmitry Dronov, marketing director for MTU-lnform, the second largest
provider of voice services to businesses. "Providers are concentrating on small and medium-sized firms," he added.
Tariffs are negotiable, but the main alternative operators currently offer longdistance and international rates close to those of state-owned Rostelecom, and even give unlimited local calls for free if the customer has significant paid traffic, as does the MGTS network.
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