Returning to the company's history, was it possible that Yota would start with LTE right away?

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Yota could not start with LTE because it is a licensed technology in our country, and at the time when the company entered the market, these licenses were not played out. There was Wimax, and Yota began working in the standard that was already available. Plus, there was already equipment on the market - both client and infrastructure.

If some new technology comes tomorrow, is Yota ready for the transformation?

The evolution of 2G-3G is an evolutionary one, while 4G is a more revolutionary story. But Yota, like all operators, is testing various technologies. Naturally, we have a fairly serious RND, and we are already testing high school coaches email database things like LTE Advanced. That is, we are studying possible standards, but I do not think that there will be anything super revolutionary compared to what is already embedded in the current 4G. This standard has a deep enough architecture to expand the speeds and technologies of data transmission. Therefore, Yota is naturally ready to evolve further.

Is it possible to say that at the very start Yota was mainly focused on geeks - people who are hungry for everything new, who use new technologies, and now it is more of a mass audience? Is it possible to talk about some difference in the audience then and now?

As a commercial person, I will say this. Yota has a clear positioning - it provides fast Internet. It is needed by a certain segment of people, but I do not think that these are geeks. These are quite successful young professionals. This [could be] just a person who, perhaps, is engaged in the media or advertising business. A person far from technology, but he has a laptop and Yota. And he does not see the point in this laptop without Yota, because it fills it with mail, video, presentations - anything. Now it is fashionable to work in coworkings, many work from cafes. I often see that people of creative professions sit with Yota. Firstly, this Internet can be given to one of their friends, and secondly, this is their lifestyle, and we fit into it with our product.

Geeks like to figure out how a modem works, what kind of battery it has, what capacity it has, and so on. Any operator has this audience. And the more technologically advanced you are (and we are technologically advanced), the more interesting you are to this audience. And a huge part of our audience, the main part, are advanced young people who a) don’t live without the Internet and b) don’t work. So I wouldn’t say that these are some kind of super-technological geeks, it’s just that at the start, mobile equipment — laptops and smartphones — were more expensive, and now that equipment is getting cheaper, we are becoming more widespread. Plus, we are expanding our geography.

If you look at Yota as a successful startup, which today has become a large serious company with a wonderful office. How would you formulate the secret of this startup's success?

I would formulate it in the words of Yota: our product is connected with the corporate culture of those people who make this product. One of our postulates is to make a product as it should be. When you pick up a Yota device and try to install it, you should not have the feeling that something here is not done as you would like. It is impossible to please everyone. But for the segment to which we address our products, we will try to work, observing this principle. I think this is one of those secrets. Even with reduced advertising costs, we continue to sell, and we are clearly identified by the need for unlimited Internet.

What haven't we mentioned in the context of the conversation about the development of the Russian Internet, its infrastructure, the history of Yota? Perhaps an important milestone, phenomenon, project or person?

I would no longer separate the Internet and telecom. And I would probably add that one of the big trends is the shift of viewing from television to the Internet. This is an important and obvious trend, and even in the US, where cable TV has a large share, the Internet's share is already very significant, and people's attention is moving from this screen. So an important trend will be the shift of video viewing to the Internet and the socialization of this whole story. That is, the so-called Social TV, Social Video: people will not just watch, they will increasingly communicate with each other. For now, these are video services with comments, but this is a prototype of something more technological and convenient.Articles June 10, 2014 • runet
The Putin They've Been Waiting For
Russian Internet entrepreneurs gathered to discuss industry issues and talk to the president for the first time in 15 years

About the future without enthusiasm
On June 10, the Internet Entrepreneurship in Russia forum was held in Moscow. The event began with a roundtable discussion on key trends in Internet development. The presidium included Arkady Volozh (Yandex), Dmitry Grishin (Mail.ru Group), Mael Gavet (Ozon), Alexander Mamut (Rambler&Co) and other prominent figures in the Russian Internet. Despite this, the discussion could not be called exciting - it seemed that its participants were too lazy to discuss the current state of the Internet and fantasize about the future.