Window on Eurasia

Russian Internet Network ‘Weak and Expensive,’ Moscow Expert Says

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 7, 2006 – Russia’s domestic Internet network is currently
too “weak and expensive” to promote the kind of progress in science,
education and technology that the country desperately needs, according
to Russia’s leading specialist on information technology.

In fact, Aleksei Soldatov, who heads both the Moscow Institute of
Information Systems and the Relkom company, says that Moscow’s
connectivity with European countries is currently far greater and less
expensive that that between the Russian capital and cities in Siberia
and the Far East
[http://www.polit.ru/author/2006/07/06kndr.html].

The net pipeline between Moscow and Europe is now capable of
transmitting 2.4 gigabits of information a second, far less than the
two 10-gigabit channels between Europe and the U.S. but far more than the
155-megabit link between Moscow and Khabarovsk.

And those differences in capacity are reflected in the cost of using
these key channels in the new information economy, Soldatov says. Until
recently, he notes, the cost of connecting Moscow to New York was only
one-fifth that of connecting the Russian capital with Yekaterinburg.

The relatively small size of its dedicated domestic pipelines means,
Soldatov continues, that Russia now “lags behind” even
“’developing’” countries in many areas and is capable of
satisfying only “the current commercial market” without allowing
for its growth or providing support for science, education and culture.

And the relatively small size of its international ties in turn means
that Moscow will soon have to get permission from its East European
neighbors for access to their relatively larger pipelines if Russian
scholars want to get involved in the most advanced research projects.

As serious as that problem is, Soldatov suggests, the absence of a
large capacity domestic network may be even more significant politically at
least in the short term. If people around the country are connected to
the Internet, students, teachers and researchers can get information
without too much difficulty.

But if they are not, if the pipelines are too small, speeds too slow,
and costs too high, as is the case all too often in the Russian
Federation today, then they will not have access to cutting edge
information and the country will suffer intellectually as well as
economically and its people will become more divided along regional
lines as a result.

In today’s Russia, Soldatov notes, many “books are published rarely
and in small tirages, and you cannot get foreign journals. But if
[Russians] have a good network, then [they] can do everything.” If
they have to rely on dial up connections via phone lines, then they
won’t be able to gain the various kinds of access they need.

That limit will hit those working in science and technology first,
Soldatov says, the very people on whom the country’s economic future
depends. But it will quickly affect the entire country, creating a
situation in which as in a dinosaur “the brains” of the Russian
Federation will be very, very far away from the country’s “tail.”

If Russia remains isolated from the international information
environment and if it fails to develop its own domestic network
quickly, then, Soldatov concludes sadly, the country’s scholarship will fall
behind “real life” and then “in the country there will be
obscurantism and absolute illiteracy.”

But all is not bleak, the Russian IT pioneer continues. Like the
situation Germany had with its army after World War I, the Russian
Federation has a small cadres of scientists who are ready, willing and
able to assume responsibility for the rapid recovery of their fields if
the government makes the commitment.

The German army of the 1920s, Soldatov points out, was very small, but
when Hitler decided to ignore the Versailles limits, every one of the
soldiers in the army of the 1920s became a corporal in the much larger
army of the 1930s. Russian scientists can do the same, he suggests,
because “the pyramid of science” remains in place.

In order for a parallel development to occur in the information sector
of Russian life, he insists, the Russian government must commit itself
and soon to investing in science and especially in the Internet
networks on which progress in science and technology requires.

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