Transition from MGTS to Rostelecom. How MGTS is fighting for half of the capital's Internet access market

Today in the market for the provision of Internet connection services are provided by several dozen providers of various sizes. Among the major ones are Rostelecom and MGTS. Which provider is the best?

Features of providers

Each of the providers has its own characteristics, strengths and weaknesses:

⦁ Monopoly. MGTS is a monopoly in the capital, therefore, in addition to standard tariffication, it includes a telephone line service fee in the Internet usage cost. Rostelecom does not charge additional funds for servicing its cables; it is immediately included in the cost of providing services.

⦁ Technologies. Both providers use PON technology, which is distinguished by its efficiency, high speed of access, and also has many other advantages that positively affect the quality of communication and facilitate service.

⦁ Cost. MGTS, as a monopoly, does not seek to significantly reduce the cost of its services for the end user. Rostelecom, in turn, is doing everything possible to make their services as accessible as possible, thereby seriously competing with MGTS. The cost of Internet access from Rostelecom is much lower than that of MGTS.

⦁ Additional services. Both telecom operators, in addition to the Internet, provide customers with various additional paid services, for example, television and other interactive services. At the same time, the number of services offered by Rostelecom is much larger.

⦁ Customization. Rostelecom's Internet connection settings are much more flexible. They can be carried out without leaving home using a personal computer.

⦁ Coverage area. While MGTS is mainly focused on the capital and occupies more than 80% of the Moscow market, Rostelecom is focused on providing services throughout Russia and is gradually treading on the heels of a competitor, systematically gaining a share of the market even in the capital.

At the moment, Rostelecom is one of the main competitors of MGTS and, in the opinion of experts, can conquer the majority of the monopolist's audience.

You can find out about the possibility of connecting to the Internet in a specific city and at a specific address on the website rt-podkluchit.ru, which provides up-to-date information, as well as a special form in which data about the place of connection is entered. The system independently analyzes the data and notifies the user about the possibility of connection.

For an objective comparison, go to https://mgts.info/ and https://onlime.site/ to choose an Internet provider for connecting the Internet MGTS or OnLime, having decided which one is more suitable.

Since modern providers are difficult to compare in terms of technical parameters, we will use the basic criteria:

• speed;
• reliability;
• good responsiveness;
• availability of tariffs.

So, let's study in more detail the features of providing services.

According to tariffs, which Internet is better - OnlineLime or MGTS

We will consider tariff plans from different points of view. It is important to find out the most optimal prices with positive and negative sides.

OnLime offers to connect to the global network starting from 300 rubles / month. for 15 Mbit, while MGTS ("Moscow City Telephone Network") starts at 100 rubles / month. for 100 Mbps. But it should be noted that promotional rates, which do not include the purchase / rent of equipment, additional servicesand the price is temporary. So, after 60 days, the price of the Moscow network will increase for the basic tariff - up to 450 rubles, while the competitor provides Wi-Fi for a fee - 69 rubles / month.

MGTS or OnlineLime, which is better - it is impossible to say for sure. You should look at individual rates with options that will not turn out to be superfluous, or at promotions:

• Express 100 (499 rubles / month for 100 Mbps with a free router and 100 GB cloud storage) from OnLime;
• 200 Mbps for 490 rubles / month from the Moscow network.

Analyzing all the offers, the tariff line of the Moscow network is noticeably more profitable, however, at the top tariffs OnLime is more interesting both in terms of cost and bonus games: "WoT", "Warface" and projects from "Fogame".

MGTS or OnLime - which is better in terms of speed and stability

You should not judge operators only by the stability of the connection, because companies use in their arsenal: ADSL (telephone line), Ethernet (twisted pair), GPON (fiber optic) and other technologies. Less reliable ADSL because communication depends on many characteristics and on the distance from the communication site. Ethernet is strongly associated with connection points (switches). The most stable and high-speed is considered to be an optical connection, but even here there is no guarantee that there will be no cable breaks anywhere.

Reviews from the Internet about quality are not credible, because most of them are screwed up, and those that are real are often biased. In addition, there is no "foolproof" from the users themselves. Nevertheless, OnLime, owned by Rostelecom, provides support faster, but this is a deeply subjective opinion.

When choosing MGTS or OnLim, it is more logical to give preference to optics or Ethernet, if, of course, there is technical capability... Both providers keep the networks up to date, and also respect the speed modes provided by the tariffs.

MGTS or OnlineLime for games and entertainment

For relatively little money, you can also connect television to the Internet. By combining several services, operators reduce prices for each separately. For example, OnLime attracts customers with the tariff "2 in 1 Year of Cinema 60", which includes 61 SD channels with a 60 Mbps network. The set looks more tempting for the Moscow network - 117 channels are delivered at 90 Mbps, and 14 of them are in HD. Typically, there is extended content in the form of movies and TV series.

Today, the Internet is unthinkable without online battles. And the main thing in them is ping (response time). To play comfortably, it takes a maximum of 30 ms, or even less. As the successor of Rostelecom, OnLime took over all its advantages. It has fewer intermediate nodes and more high-speed servers. In addition, the provider has a good range of gaming services.

The best provider - MGTS or OnlineLime?

Answering the question, which Internet is better - OnlineLime or MGTS, it is necessary to take into account the user's hobbies. If the speed above 100 Mbps and watching TV are more important, then it is recommended to stop at MGTS. For the gamer, OnLime is great.

In any case, it is fairer to assess the quality on your own. Firstly, when you connect, you do not lose anything, but on the contrary, you win. Secondly, these providers are in the top ratings lists.

MGTS wants to capture 50% of the Moscow market for Internet access services. To do this, the company is ready to install fiber optics in every apartment and donate it to Muscovites via a Wi-Fi modem. But the first results of the attraction of unprecedented generosity are not impressive, and another telephone giant, Rostelecom, is breathing in MGTS's back.

Text: Yuliana Petrova

On the table of Dmitry Kulakovsky, MGTS Marketing and Development Director, is a rare 1940s government communications apparatus - iron, with a gilded USSR emblem on a dialing disk. This is a kind of symbol of stability: the USSR collapsed a long time ago, and MGTS is still a monopoly on the capital's fixed-line market. True, the company itself has not been owned by the state for a long time, and the fixed telephony market is stagnating: from 2008 to 2012, the volume of telephone traffic fell by 8% per year. Now MGTS is betting on new services - Internet and digital TV. By 2016, the telephony monopolist wants to win 50% retail market Broadband access (broadband access) in Moscow and 25% of the Pay TV market. Since 2012, MGTS has been changing copper telephone cable for fiber optic throughout the capital and by 2015 will spend $ 2 billion for this purpose.

The problem is that in Moscow penetration broadband is already 82%, at least two or three providers' networks are stretched to each Moscow entrance. There is nowhere to get new clients of MGTS, except from competitors. At the same time, another telephone giant, the Russian fixed-line monopoly Rostelecom (the main shareholder is the state), has been actively involved in poaching other people's subscribers for three years. He is also going to become the market leader. Who will win this battle of the giants?

On "Stream"

Dmitry Kulakovsky shows fresh MGTS brochures, rich blue, with photos of young beautiful girls. Previously, the blue MGTS logo in the shape of an egg is made voluminous and colored with shades of purple. “It turned out more dynamically,” Kulakovsky is sure. Both the girls and the logo are the results of the recent rebranding of MGTS, aimed primarily at young people who consider the telephone operator a relic of the past.

Now MGTS serves phones in 96% of Moscow apartments (3.6 million telephone numbers) and 48% of telephones in offices (about 800 thousand telephone lines). Its revenue for 9 months of 2013 amounted to 27.2 billion rubles, and net profit - 9.9 billion rubles. Since the 2000s, MGTS has been under the control of AFK Sistema's structures. Since the end of 2006, the main shareholder of MGTS has been the long-distance operator Comstar-UTS, and in 2011 MGTS became a subsidiary of MTS.

MGTS is a pioneer in the mass market for Internet access services in Moscow. Since 2004, it has been providing its network to the parent company Comstar, the latter, under the Stream brand, selling Internet access services using ADSL technology (Internet over a telephone wire). At the end of 2007 MGTS presented its own line of tariffs for the "people's Internet". They were designed for a mass audience - people who are far from technical people who use the Internet from time to time. They collected all pensioners and reactionaries from the market, analysts joked.

but aDSL technology quickly outdated. Its limit was 20 Mbps. By the end of the 2000s, other providers - VimpelCom, Akado and NetByNet - built fiber-optic networks, where speeds are 2-3 times higher. And the most demanding ADSL subscribers began to switch to "optics".

Rostelecom also took advantage of this trend. In early 2011, the company bought National Cable Networks (NCC), an aggressively developing provider of Pay TV and Internet access, providing services under the OnLime brand (then 4.4% of the capital's broadband access market).

Tariff wars

A fat man with glasses, pale from night vigils at the computer, looks sadly at the monitor, waiting for the file to finish downloading. An Ethernet cable appears in front of him like a cobra:

- Are you going to hang out, Alyosha?

- Who are you?

- I have 20 megabit internet for 500 rubles.

Alyosha grabs the "Internet" and sticks it into the computer.

This commercial, which was broadcast on all major TV channels, was NCC's first marketing campaign under the new owner. Rostelecom has radically reduced tariffs: for example, the 500-ruble tariff advertised in the video for 20 Mbps used to cost 900 rubles. After the price cut, the tariff became 10-20% cheaper than that of Akado and VimpelCom, and almost 60% cheaper than Stream. In 2011, Rostelecom almost doubled its OnLime subscriber base. "70% of our new subscribers came from other operators," says general manager NKS Dmitry Bragin.

In the summer of 2011, MGTS also cut tariffs. Its minimum tariff "Economical" for 2 Mbit / s for 145 rubles. per month was the cheapest in Moscow. Monthly revenue per user (ARPU) from MGTS was 250 rubles. with a market average ARPU of RUB 350 The lack of competitive high-speed tariffs... Then the CEO of MGTS, a native of MTS Sergey Ivanov, launched a project to build a fiber-optic gPON networks new generation, the fastest in Moscow. The estimate dragged on $ 2 billion. It was about laying fiber optic from automatic telephone exchanges throughout the capital to each apartment by 2015 and increasing the speed in the future to 1 Gbit / s. The competitors' networks are based on fiber-to-building technology and provide subscribers with a maximum of 100 Mbps.

Anna Aibasheva, a representative of VimpelCom, assures that subscribers do not need such high speeds yet. A modern consumer needs 100 Mbps to use broadband access on multiple computers, play online games, watch digital television in HD quality.

211 thous.

of subscribers refused from ADSL-access "Stream" in 2009-2010. But the number of subscribers of the "people's Internet" ADSL from MGTS for the same period increased by 215 thousand (up to 335 thousand households)

"Jeponization" of all Moscow

In the summer of 2012, an army of installers flooded the sleeping areas of Moscow. Young men in overalls were drilling through the walls, cutting off old telephone wires and running fiber optic cables into apartments. Throughout the city, they installed white Chinese-made boxes in apartments above the door. Through these devices, as the installers explained to the apartment owners, it is possible to connect not only a telephone, but also many new services: digital TV, video surveillance and fire alarms. And most importantly, the "box" is capable of distributing the Internet to several computers and wireless devices in an apartment via Wi-Fi at speeds up to 350 Mbps. MGTS purchased terminals for 1.7 thousand rubles. apiece, and for customers they are free.

And immediately complaints fell on MGTS, Internet forums and Roskomnadzor. People complained that the installers did not show up at the appointed time or threatened to cut the telephone wires for those who abandoned GPON. Another attack - after switching to "optics" the phone stopped working. It turned out, in particular, that the network does not work well with pulse dialing, to which the telephones were configured - it was required to switch the phones to tone dialing mode.

Muscovites refused new technology: Why switch to GPON if the phone won't work better, but the Internet is already there? By the fall of 2012, MGTS had connected only 45 thousand telephony subscribers to GPON. Then MTS, shareholder of MGTS, dissatisfied with the results of "jeeponization", replaced the CEO of the "daughter". In the fall of 2012, Andrei Ershov, ex-director of the MTS Ural macroregion, was appointed to this post. New chapter MGTS slowed down the construction of the network in order to deal with the accumulated problems.

First of all, MGTS got rid of unscrupulous contractors, and the rest began to pay not on time, as before, but piece by piece - for the number of subscribers connected without complaints or delays. The number of complaints has decreased significantly.

Then Ershov started organizing customer service. “Earlier you called MGTS with some kind of problem, the girl in the call center could only check the debt,” Kulakovsky recalls. Now from the call center the subscriber is switched to the service technical support... "These are 200 engineers who solve customer problems over the phone, without going home," says Kulakovsky. Most often, the problem can be solved remotely, and in other cases an emergency team will visit the client. Service is organized in a similar way for all metropolitan providers, but for MGTS this system has become an innovation.

Andrey Ershov hired eight partner call centers for rolling out calls to clients. They described the advantages of GPON to distrustful subscribers. By the end of 2012, out of 800 thousand Moscow households covered by the GPON network, 21% of telephony subscribers (167 thousand apartments) switched to "optics". The network was being installed in parallel: by the end of 2013, it covered 2.2 million households - more than half of all Moscow apartments, and the number of connected subscribers reached 700 thousand people. True, the users of new services are much smaller: 43% of connected subscribers (300 thousand people) "subscribed" to broadband access from MGTS, and half were former MGTS ADSL subscribers. And 6% of connected subscribers subscribed to Pay TV.

The competitors turned out to be right: very few people need ultra-high Internet speeds so far, only 3% of users have chosen tariffs from 100 Mbps. The service is quite expensive: subscribers of unlimited telephony MGTS are offered 200 Mbps Internet for 1.1 thousand rubles.

Sale! Sale! Sale!

Rostelecom treated MGTS's results with disdain: they say, they have entangled half of Moscow with networks, and the cat cried out about connections. But only at first - already in the summer of 2013, Rostelecom began to patch up the gaps in its own network so that MGTS would not use them. For example, Rostelecom's network did not extend to the South-Eastern Administrative District of Moscow, numbering 430,000 households. Rostelecom had to pull fiber there. Since mid-2013, marketing wars began between Rostelecom and MGTS.

MGTS staked on package tariffs - Internet plus telephone. If a person uses an expensive unlimited telephone tariff (481 rubles per month), the company offers him serious discounts on TV and Internet. Another advantage is the payment of services post factum, in a single invoice with monthly fee for the phone.

In turn, Rostelecom has reduced the cheapest tariffs for OnLime by 25-30% for budget ADSL subscribers of MGTS: the 5-megabit tariff dropped to 200 rubles. per month. For comparison: the minimum tariff for MGTS " GPON Internet - 10 Mbit / s "costs 300 rubles per month.

According to iKS-Consulting, in the first nine months of 2013 MGTS did a little more than Rostelecom. MGTS attracted 115 thousand new broadband subscribers, and Rostelecom - 108.3 thousand people. Nevertheless, Konstantin Ankilov, Managing Partner of iKS-Consulting, notes that Rostelecom is increasing its subscriber base faster than all Internet providers in Moscow (+ 27% compared to nine months of 2012). He believes that Rostelecom has successfully exploited the weaknesses of MGTS and the temporary passivity of VimpelCom and Akado. He primarily lured away disgruntled ADSL users. MGTS, in spite of huge investments, developed more slowly (+ 12%). The market share of MGTS remained the same - 26% (1.046 million subscribers), while that of Rostelecom increased to 13% (506.3 thousand subscribers).

Land baron

Currently, the load of the GPON network with new services does not exceed 15% of the built capacity, but by 2016 the company hopes to bring it to 70%. Since the fall of 2013, MGTS has stopped distributing "boxes" to everyone, and installs them only to those who, in addition to the phone, immediately agree to connect to broadband or TV.

"Jeponization" has already given the telephone monopolist economic effectalthough not related to it direct activity... MGTS was one of the largest real estate owners in Moscow. In 2004, its 561 automatic telephone exchanges occupied a total area of \u200b\u200babout 1.6 million square meters. m. By 2011, the number of automatic telephone exchanges decreased to 253, about 500 thousand square meters. m of vacated areas were transferred to the structures of AFK Sistema. Now MGTS has 311 buildings with an area of \u200b\u200b1.06 million square meters. m.

As a result of the transition to GPON, the number of core telephone exchanges should be reduced by four times. That is, about 700 thousand square meters should be vacated. m of area. And even if MGTS leases them, its income will be 6-7 billion rubles. in year. But the company is going to sell part of the premises. In the summer of 2013, MGTS separated a subsidiary from MGTS-real estate, CJSC Business-real estate, to whose balance it transferred 76 buildings with a total area of \u200b\u200b182 thousand square meters. m. The buildings were selected on the basis of the fastest release date and favorable location. And in December 2013, the controlling stake in Business Real Estate was transferred to AFK Sistema for 3.2 billion rubles. So the "jeeponization" of Moscow has already taken place - regardless of how many Internet and TV subscribers MGTS will pick up.

Alexander Shatikov, partner at AC&M Consulting:

- MGTS has a very strong marketing position, due to the large number of telephony subscribers: the company can subsidize one service at the expense of another and make profitable package offers... Today's tariffs MGTS attractive to those telephony subscribers who pay for an unlimited or combined tariff. For other subscribers, MGTS tariffs are close to those offered by competitors (and sometimes even higher) - it will be difficult for MGTS to drag out such users. This can be done only at the expense of good quality services, and the process will go slowly: broadband providers have a fairly loyal base.

Legal force

The share of MGTS in the business telephony market is 48%, and in the sector of data transmission services for legal entities - only 5%. MGTS expects to strengthen its position with the help of the provider Taskom, which was purchased in 2012, which has more than 10 thousand corporate clients, as well as the largest in Moscow wi-Fi network... In 2013, MGTS switched 9.5 thousand legal entities to GPON, of which 1.4 thousand companies "subscribed" to the Internet. MGTS expects to switch almost all tenants of the first floors of residential buildings to the "optical" Internet.

Pioneer of GPON

Rostelecom was the first, in 2008, to start building GPON networks in Russia; the operator has the largest number of connections in the Northwestern Federal District, Central Federal District, the Urals and Siberia. In 2008, 5 thousand households were connected to GPON in the country, in 2010 - about 200 thousand households. In the same year, Rostelecom announced that, due to the high cost of the project, it would lay GPON networks only in those big citieswhere it is economically feasible. In medium and small settlements, it will continue to connect subscribers using "copper" DSL technology, and new networks will be built using less costly "optics to home" and "optics to the block" (FTTB and FTTC) technologies. At the end of the third quarter of 2013, Rostelecom, according to its own data, had 3.5 million optics subscribers in the country. Until 2018, Rostelecom plans to install optical networks in 33 million households in the country and cover all houses above four floors. This will cost the operator at least $ 10 billion.