Alexander Plyushchev: "Intra-country roaming. Stop putting up with it"

“Russia is not a single country. There is one state language, one currency, formally there is one federal government and its laws with the Constitution, but from the point of view of cellular communications there are more than 80 states. Because we have intra-country roaming. I don’t I know of no other country where this ugly, shameful phenomenon that divides our country would exist, quite understandable and explainable in the realities of the “dashing 90s”, it looks like a wild and inappropriate atavism 15 (!) years after the cellular phone. communication has begun to become widespread. If you are traveling from Munich to Hamburg (776 km), or from Chicago to LA (3200 km), or from Kharkov to Lviv (1017 km), that is, traveling within the same country, even between neighboring regions, even if you cross the state from end to end, you don’t have to worry about your mobile communications expenses: the expenses will be exactly the same as if you stayed at home. The opposite picture is observed if you are going to travel from Moscow, say, to Vladimir. (190 km) or, for example, to Tver (170 km), remaining in the network of the same operator. At such a tiny distance by the standards of modern transport within formally one country and one federal district, but in different regions you will have a roaming tariff. Now operators make various, in my opinion, humiliating services for the user, by connecting which he can minimize expenses, but they will still (including service activation) differ from expenses in the home region. Previously, it was fashionable to explain this by a huge country. But from the examples above we see that there are countries quite comparable to Russia or at least its European part in terms of inhabited territory, where there is no intra-country roaming. Moreover, it is strange to explain roaming by the size of the country if roaming begins outside a radius of 150 km, in any direction. "