The Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation has once again put on the table the controversial initiative to introduce an additional fee for mobile subscribers who use international internet traffic. According to information from the publication “Kommersant“, the new financial restrictions will affect users of 5G networks, and the proposed free limit is fixed at 50 gigabytes per month.
The main goal of the renewal of these discussions is to control traffic to foreign servers and sources using VPN services to circumvent the restrictions. However, the measure faces serious technical and logistical barriers, telecom experts and representatives of the sector admit.
The main problem lies in the architecture of the networks themselves. Currently, 5G coverage in the country relies on the existing LTE (4G) infrastructure through the so-called Non-Standalone (NSA) architecture. In real time, subscriber devices constantly switch between 5G and 4G signals, which makes accurate charging and allocation of international IP addresses an extremely complex task for operators. To activate such a system, complex hardware and software solutions for deep packet inspection (DPI) and reclassification of all IP traffic will be required.
According to Strategy Partners, the average Russian user consumes about 24 GB of total mobile Internet per month, with only 13.8 percent of subscribers exceeding the 50 GB limit. Since the 50 GB limit affects only international servers in the 5G range, it will mostly hit users using mobile devices for streaming, heavy downloads through foreign platforms, or data transfer through VPN tunnels. The specific amount of fees for each additional gigabyte above the limit has not yet been finalized.