In Moscow, amid disruptions to mobile internet, demand for network-independent communication and navigation devices has increased sharply. The biggest increases were in pagers, landline phones, walkie-talkies, and paper maps.
In Moscow, amid disruptions to mobile internet, demand for network-independent communication and navigation devices has increased sharply. The biggest increases were in pagers, landline phones, walkie-talkies, and paper maps.
According to Russian media, in Moscow from March 6 to 10, sales of pagers increased by 73%, of household walkie-talkies by 27%, and of landline phones by 25%. Separately, a jump in demand for paper navigation was recorded: sales of maps, atlases and guidebooks in the Russian capital jumped by 48% compared to the previous week.
Most often, buyers did not take abstract guides, but practical things for moving around the city and region. These are maps of Moscow and the Moscow region, metro and suburban transport schemes. On marketplaces, certain categories added even more: sales of paper road maps reportedly increased by 170% in units, and of folding maps by 70%.
At the same time, Moscow is already assessing the associated losses for businesses. Over the five days of restrictions, they could amount to approximately $38-63 million. Delivery services, taxis, car sharing, and retail, which are directly dependent on stable mobile internet, are said to have suffered the most.
There were also separate reports of problems with public Wi-Fi. In the first week of March, traffic and the number of connections to urban access points in Moscow and St. Petersburg decreased noticeably. This indicates that the outages affected not only mobile communications, but also parts of the infrastructure that were supposed to work as a backup option.
Massive problems with mobile Internet in Moscow began to be recorded on March 6. Against this background, the demand for offline means of communication and navigation has increased sharply, and with it, interest in any solutions that allow you to navigate the city and maintain basic communication without access to the network.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how Russian providers stopped connecting WhatsApp without a VPN: access to the service was cut off at the level of domain records in the state DNS infrastructure.
