Editing Telecommunications in Russia (section)

==Regulation==
The [[Ministry of Communications and Mass Media (Russia)|Ministry of Communications and Mass Media]] is responsible for establishing and enforcing state policy in the sphere of electronic and postal communications, for promulgating the development and introduction of new information and communication technologies, and for coordinating the work of other state agencies in this area. Legislative oversight is exercised mainly through the State Duma Committee for mass media. The Committee develops mass media-related draft laws, and provides expert analysis of laws submitted by other Duma committees regarding their compliance with current media law.

===Universal Service Fund===
Universal Service Fund is a fund to finance socially important projects, for example, providing payphones in remote settlements. It consists of the contributions of all Russian operators of 1.2% of revenue. These funds are the Federal Communications Agency (Rossvyaz) distributes between 21 universal operator. These operators money comes to the budget, and Rossvâz receives from the budget for compensation and still these amounts roughly coincided, employee profile departments. But universal operators recently complained that they themselves lack the money to compensate for losses in the implementation of social projects.

In February 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed amendments to the federal law "''On Communications''", which set Rostelecom a single operator of universal communication services. The company must commit itself to support the existing infrastructure of Universal Service, including payphones and access points (VRM) on the Internet. In addition to these duties, a single operator will also fight the digital divide by providing broadband at speeds of at least 10&nbsp;Mbit / s settlements up to 250 people.<ref>{{cite web| url =http://www.comnews.ru/node/80789|title="Ростелеком" получит миллиарды на ШПД| work = comnews.ru|date=20 February 2014| access-date = 21 February 2014}}</ref><ref>{{cite web| url =http://ria.ru/economy/20140220/995994372.html|title=Инвестпрограмма "Ростелекома" до 2018 года превысит 270 млрд рублей| work =[[RIA Novosti]]|date=20 February 2014| access-date = 21 February 2014}}</ref>