Internet in Russia

As of 2015[update], Internet access in Russia is available to businesses and home users in various forms, including dial-up, cable, DSL, FTTH, mobile, wireless and satellite.

Retrospectively, networking of data in the Russian language can be traced to the spread of mail and journalism in Russia, and information transfer by technical means came with the telegraph and radio.

An 1837 sci-fi novel The Year 4338: Petersburg Letters, by the 19th-century Russian philosopher Vladimir Odoevsky, contains predictions such as "friends' houses are connected by means of magnetic telegraphs that allow people who live far from each other to talk to each other" and household journals "having replaced regular correspondence" with "information about the hosts’ good or bad health, family news, various thoughts and comments, small inventions, as well as invitations.

Starting from 1952, work was conducted in the Moscow-based Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering (headed by Sergei Lebedev) on automated missile defense system which used a computer network which calculated radar data on test missiles through central machine called M-40 and was interchanging information with smaller remote terminals about 100—200 kilometers distant.

[9] The scientists used several locations in the USSR for their works, the largest was a massive test range to the West from Lake Balkhash known as Sary Shagan.

From the early 1980s the All Union Scientific Research Institute for Applied Computerized Systems (VNIIPAS) was working to implement data connections over the X.25 telephone protocol to form the USSR-wide Academset.

The other participating countries were the UK, USA, Canada, Sweden, FRG, GDR, Italy, Finland, Philippines, Guatemala, Japan, Thailand, Luxembourg, Denmark, Brazil and New Zealand.

[11] Also, in 1983 the San Francisco Moscow Teleport (SFMT) was started by VNIIPAS and an American team which included Joel Schatz, Michael Kleeman and Chet Watson with initial financial support from Henry Dakin.

It also undertook several slowscan video[12] links between the two countries, including supporting physicians such as UCLA's Bob Gale in treating patients exposed in the Chernobyl accident.

In 1990 a GlasNet non-profit initiative by the US-based Association for Progressive Communications sponsored Internet usage in several educational projects in the USSR (through Sovam).

The first one to connect UNIX email hosts country-wide (including Soviet Republics) was the Relcom organization which formed on August 1, 1990 at the Kurchatov nuclear physics institute in Moscow.

In 1990–1991 Relcom's network was rapidly expanding, it joined EUnet, registered .su domain, and was used to spread news about the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 worldwide while coupers through KGB were trying to suppress mass media activity on the subject.

Russian FidoNet activity did contribute to the development of Runet, as mass-networking over BBSes was for a time more popular than over the Internet in the early 90s.

In March 1991, the National Science Foundation began to allow Eastern Bloc countries to connect to the global TCP/IP network (the "Internet proper").

[18] In October 2007, then-Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced that all of schools in Russia (about 59,000) were connected to the Internet, but later concerns were publicized that there were problems with a contractor to serve them.

[19] In subsequent years test results were considered successful, but new organizational problems appeared, including obscurities with distribution of funds assigned by state.

Mobile broadband connectivity is close to average for advanced economies (60 active subscriptions for every 100 inhabitants), the rates of mobile phone penetration is one of the highest in the world, and Russia is a global leader in the affordability of fixed broadband, with subscriber costs meeting the affordability criteria of the UN International Telecommunication Union meeting more than 90 percent of Russian households.

Largest residential Internet service providers by market share at the end of 2013 were: Rostelecom: 38.6%, ER-Telecom: 11.1%, VimpelCom: 10.1%, MTS: 9.4%, TransTelekom: 4.6%, AKADO: 3.3%, Others: 22.9%[32] Since 2013, the state has employed Internet users in order to spread propaganda and disinformation advocating activities of the Russian government and discrediting opposition and Western countries according to the US paper New York Times.

However, low transmission capacity (560 megabits per second) of all the three systems designed mainly for voice communication became the principal obstacle that hindered international expansion.

[38] The Black Sea coast of Russia has become an important area for the fiber-optic networks, as it served as a backbone of communication during the Winter Olympic Games in 2014.

[41] Presently, MasterTel, based in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, is an ISP that provides high speed fiber-optic lines of up to 10 Gbit/s per second to consumers and businesses.