Ministry of Communications explained why roaming with Russia has not been cancelled
Why the process of cancelling roaming with Russia has dragged on for years and why its full cancellation has not happened, was explained on STB by First Deputy Minister of Communications Pavel Tkach.
Illustrative photo. Source: Dmitry Travnikov / Getty Images
The cancellation of roaming has been discussed for so long that even propagandist Alena Syrova on STB asked: "We have been working on the same roaming for a very long time. Pavel Nikolaevich, how are things today? Why did it take us so long to approach this issue, at least to start solving it?"
Pavel Tkach, First Deputy Minister of Communications and Informatization of Belarus, did not give hope that roaming would finally disappear, despite all previous promises.
He replied that the problem is technical, although he explained it with financial factors.
"Why didn't we make a full cancellation? This question is often asked. First of all, it's a technical issue. When we are in roaming, at least three operators are always working: the home network operator, the guest network operator, and the transit operator. And, accordingly, the costs are slightly higher than when you communicate within your own network. Therefore, yes, we limited a certain profit for operators, but nevertheless, we were able to establish that the decision that was made was absolutely weighed and correct," he said.
According to the official, new rules, effective from March 2025, have their limits. According to the new norms, Belarusians in Russia (and vice versa) receive "150 minutes of incoming calls free per month, 150 outgoing calls from minutes included in the tariff package, and up to 5 gigabytes of internet traffic at rates comparable to those in the home network."
Explaining the multi-year delay in resolving the issue, the official referred to technical difficulties and the fight against "unscrupulous people."
"Why so long? Because it was necessary to resolve a number of technical and legal issues, including fraud prevention. That is, if we understand that we have cheap calls on cellular networks, unscrupulous people, fraudsters, might appear who will use these networks to transfer expensive commercial traffic. We needed to clearly understand that the traffic that people use on cellular networks is indeed privileged roaming traffic," he said.
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