UPDATE: Com minister says Russia to cancel internal roaming in H1 2018

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MOSCOW, Dec 28 (PRIME) -- Russia will cancel roaming on its territory in January–June 2018, Communications and Mass Media Minister Nikolai Nikiforov said on Thursday.

“At first, the antimonopoly service set the task of finishing the work in 2017. Our cooperation brought us to mutual understanding of the fact that doing it in 2017 is physically impossible. The connection network is immense with thousands of tariff plans,” Nikiforov told reporters.

“I believe that the issues of intra-network and national roaming will be most likely settled in 2018. It will mainly take place in the first or second quarters. I hope that there will be no more serious questions left in the second half (of 2018).

“The whole range of operators said today that a significant part of subscribers already use tariff plans where these notions are in the past judging by prices. We think that no laws are needed to ban certain notions, like roaming and other types of services.”

All the country’s large connection operators have already started revising their tariffs to abolish roaming, the minister said.

“We confirm that all the biggest operators have seriously started revising the tariff plans so that this notion would stay in the past,” Nikiforov said.

Mobile operator VimpelCom, working under the Beeline brand, cut tariffs for trips across the country where clients register in networks of other operators. Mobile operator MegaFon will start cancelling intra-network roaming in January 2018.

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