How to read Vedomosti on a mobile phone

    The company MTS issued a press release about the launch of a new project - access to the newspaper "Vedomosti" through the WAP-portal operator . “This method of obtaining a newspaper, of course, is convenient for many business people, and is especially relevant for those who are outside of Russia and are not able to read the paper version of the newspaper,” said Pavel Roitberg, director of the product and services development department of the company. “Therefore, we are confident that the Vedomosti mobile format will be in great demand, especially since the cost of the mobile version is comparable to the cost of a printed newspaper.”

    The press release did not say that MTS subscribers had the opportunity to read the Vedomosti newspaper a year ago. True, for this it was necessary to use a slightly different technology - I-Mode. MTS invested tens of millions of dollars in the launch of this Japanese miracle, but this summer the further promotion of the service was suspended . But in late 2004, when MTS signed an agreement with NTT DoCoMo on licensing I-Mode , the parties could not clearly answer the question of why I-mode is needed today. Of course, in 2000, I-mode defeated WAP. But by the year 2004, everything had changed: WAP had become more functional, WAP had become cheaper due to the advent of the GPRS protocol, and here I-Mode didn’t look much against its background.

    Why then the MTS did not understand this, remains a mystery. It is only known that this spring the leadership was dismissed . Not because of I-Mode, of course, but because of more global miscalculations.

    And here they are, the steps of the new management. “From anywhere in the world where cellular communications are available, an MTS subscriber will be able to receive a fresh newspaper number every day, which will cost him as much as a retail paper newspaper,” the press release said. Yes, indeed, subscribing to Vedomosti is not so expensive: $ 0.60 for a single issue or $ 3 for a weekly issue. Plus, of course, the fee for WAP-traffic: $ 8 for 1MB.

    However, even if you do not take smartphones into account, it turns out that WAP, like I-Mode, has not been relevant for a year now. Because there was a small, free and wonderful program: Opera Mini . It is installed on any more or less advanced cell phone, and allows you to download any arbitrarily large pages from the Internet. It is with the help of her that I read the notorious Vedomosti for more than six months, while paying only for traffic. And thanks to Demyan Kudryavtsev, who was appointed Director General of Kommersant at the beginning of the year , access to the latest issue became free and I was able to read this second most important business newspaper in the country.

    Finally, one fine day, Mobile Research Group analystEldar Murtazin showed me how to let Opera Mini bypass the WAP gateway - and when I watched Vedomosti on my mobile phone, I began to pay 32 times less ($ 0.25 per 1MB). And what after all this does MTS offer me? In my opinion, MTS is either trying to capitalize on the incompetence of its subscribers, or is itself again showing incompetence.

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