Companies’ attempts of “outer space” meaning telecom segment exploration started long before today. They say that TTK showed an interest in landing this market even a year ago, the company held close negotiations with Megafon about common business, and then went to other “big three” operators. Svyazinvest as Rostelecom’s “lord and master” also pays close attention to such a piece of pie as radio frequencies and now keeps an eye on Megafon.
Svyazinvest guys are persistent, and, as proverb says, if a mountain doesn’t come to Magomet, he comes to the mountain, when they failed to buy Megafon, they moved to plan B. “Union of Svyazinvest and Megafon is the best variant because fixed lines of the latter are twice less than those of two major competitors – MTS and VympelCom” – the Ministry said a year ago. However, the mobile operator keeps going it’s own way, merging one by one with regional fixed networks.
Both “magistral” operators projects promise to be as like as two peas. As Maxim Bukin said last week “New TTK MVNO will hardly have problems with subscribers’ base. All they need to do is to switch all their 980 thous. employees to new “virtual””. Rostelecom seems to easily make a million base the same way. One thing remains unclear – where is that “administrative power” that should have allowed creation of fourth national telecom operator? The idea to create a “virtual” and then transform it to “real” wireless operator seems odious. We know how things go in Russia.