Payphones of Russia want to supplement the Ministry of Emergency Situations

A payphone in the village of Mitinskaya (Dmitrovskoye rural settlement of the Shatura region). Photo: Novik

By order of the President of the Russian Federation of June 7, 2018 No. Pr-969, the Ministry of Communications prepared a draft law on equipping pay phones of the Russian Federation with special emergency notifications. On February 18, 2019, the draft law on amending the Law on Communication was published on the Federal portal of draft regulatory legal acts.

The bottom line is that almost no one uses payphones today, and they are being allocated very large sums of money from the so-called “universal service reserve” for their support. This is a financial fund to which all telecom operators in Russia are required to transfer 1.2% of the proceeds. According to the ex-Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov: "Everyone who called, everyone who used the machine costs 35,000 rubles to the budget.", The estimate was made in December 2012. Perhaps since then the amount has grown.

The money is very big. Some experts believe that the equipment with sirens is a convenient reason to save payphones, and hence, the funding that goes to Rossvyaz. The project is also beneficial to equipment suppliers, since Russian-made annunciators will be purchased.

The text of the draft law proposes the following amendment:

...
3) to add the third paragraph of part 2 after the words “operational services” with the words “and the function of informing the population about the threat or the occurrence of an emergency situation of a natural or man-made character”;
...

According to Rossvyaz, at the end of 2018, 147.7 thousand payphones remained in Russia (of which 2.2 thousand are in Moscow).

The press service of Rossvyaz said they support the expansion of the functionality of payphones. The Kommersant interlocutor in the Federal Communications and Telecommunications Network of the Russian Federal Communications Agency (responsible for the emergency notification system in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sevastopol) says that the Federal State Unitary Enterprise will oversee the project of retrofitting payphones with audio warning systems: “Equipment required for the project Since 2014, he is already in testing and is now working in the region of Siberia and the Far East, ”he said. The structures of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise “Russian Broadcasting and Alert Networks” will be responsible for its production, and it will take six months to enter mass production.

Annunciators on payphones will complement the already existing public alert systems.

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