Francesco Bisignani

Connecting schools to the Internet across the Russian Federation

State policy aims to overcome the digital divide

Vitaly Slizen, General Director of Synterra

The Russian Federation covers 17 075 400 square kilometres — the largest country in the world, with diverse environments and communities. But in the space of just over one year, some 52 000 schools across the land were connected to the Internet, as part of government efforts to close the digital divide.

In 2006, the government of the Russian Federation outlined the country's main development goals for the short term and launched four high-priority national projects aimed at improving the quality of people's lives in the main social spheres of education, public health care, affordable housing and agriculture.

The main goal of the national education project was to create the conditions for ensuring that all citizens of the Russian Federation are equally well served in terms of modern, high-quality education. One of the ways of achieving this lay in eliminating the digital divide between urban and rural schools, and between different types of educational institution, by connecting all of them to the Internet.

This objective was consistent with programmes adopted under the framework of the World Summit on the Information Society (and in particular the Tunis Commitment), aimed at identifying ways to reduce digital inequality and foster information and communication technologies (ICT) and the Internet as a universally accessible means of communication. In the Russian Federation, such ubiquitous, equitable and affordable access has initially been made available to young people and schoolchildren. That is, those members of the community who are currently most in need of the State's assistance and support, but who in the very near future will be working towards full achievement of the country's economic, social and cultural development and the welfare of its people.

The first priority in implementing the education project was to put together the technical infrastructure to enable pupils and teachers to access the global information resources of the Internet and modern educational technologies. To this end, it was necessary to provide all educational institutions with round-the-clock, high-speed (at least 128 kbit/s) access to the global information network.

The school connectivity project encompassed over 52 000 educational establishments which, at the start of 2006, had no broadband connection. These included not only conventional schools, but also evening schools, boarding schools, correctional and special schools and schools attached to penal facilities. This is particularly worthy of attention, since the programme to construct an information society in the Russian Federation included the requirement that everyone be provided with equal opportunities to use information technologies.

Financed by government and implemented by industry

The project was financed by the State to the tune of three billion roubles (approximately USD 100 million) from the national budget. Under the terms of the project, all schools were to be connected by midnight on 31 December 2007 and provided with round-the-clock Internet access for a period of two years, together with technical support and content filtering to ensure that pupils do not come into contact with materials inappropriate to their studies.

As is required under Russian law, an invitation to tender was issued to select the company to implement the project. The winning company was RTComm.RU, an open joint-stock company (OJSC) and a member of the Synterra Group. RTComm.RU deployed a virtual private network to provide connectivity to over 52 000 schools nationwide. The network was constructed on the backbone owned by the Synterra Group, which was also engaged in managing the project, involving dozens of companies throughout the country. As the project was fully financed by the government, the contractual works were jointly supervised by the Russian Federation's Ministry of Education and Science, Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications, Federal Education Agency, and the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications.

Similar school connectivity projects have been implemented by a number of European countries in recent years; however, the Russian project is unique. First, it was entirely State financed. Second, it was carried out within a very short timeframe: less than 14 months from launch to completion. Work began following signature of the contract on 13 September 2006 and was completed in a little over one year. On 26 October 2007, Dmitry Medvedev (at that time First Deputy Prime Minister) officially announced to the media that the connection of the Russian Federation's educational institutions to the World Wide Web had been completed and that every pupil would henceforth have access to the Internet. The crowning glory of the project was its pure scale: over 52 000 sites connected over a vast territory.

Synterra Primary schoolchildren in Karanino village, Ulianovsk region

The scale of the project required the involvement of virtually all the companies from the Russian Federation's telecommunication sector, from infrastructure concerns installing the "last mile" to school premises, to companies handling the construction of communication facilities and supply of equipment. In all, the project engaged over 6000 people who had to travel to the most remote parts of the country. They had to carry in equipment by all possible means, set up very small aperture terminal (VSAT) satellite stations or install wired asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) terminals in all weather conditions and bearing in mind that a full 20 per cent of the sites in question were located in remote and sometimes inaccessible areas.

Given the large number of project participants and complexity of the oversight arrangements, meticulous attention had to be paid to the whole question of support with information technology. The Synterra Group set up a free telephone hotline to provide on-site users with detailed technical support and information. At the same time, all participants were given access to a unified Internet project management portal capable of gathering information from them in real time and serving as a central point of access to vital data.

Synterra, the core company of the Synterra Group, managed all aspects of this comprehensive telecommunication project, during the course of which it had to overcome a considerable number of difficult situations. These included the absence of roads in many remote districts, of a telephone connection in 12 000 of the schools, and even of electricity in several hundred educational facilities. In addition to these challenges, it had to organize large-scale equipment deliveries that needed unusual means of transport, including helicopters and heavy-duty tracked vehicles to deliver equipment to the most inaccessible corners of the country. It was then necessary to train and coordinate the work of dozens of installation teams, implement a system for interacting with the relevant State entities and authorities, and attend to the rapid upgrading and expansion of its own backbone network.

VSAT technology reaches remote communities

Owing to the vast size of the Russian Federation and to the differences in living standards it was not possible to connect all schools using only wired solutions, particularly in rural areas. Instead, satellites provided an answer, with access through VSAT. Of the 37 000 rural schools that were connected, many made use of VSAT technology. And in 80 per cent of those communities, VSAT offers the only means of broadband access to the Internet.

Using VSAT technology, the project connected 7284 schools in 53 regions (see Figure 1). This is a remarkable figure when compared with the 8000 or so VSAT stations set up by the country's fixed-satellite service operators by the end of 2006, during the ten years or more of that technology's development.

Achieving such a high number of satellite connections within the time-frame of the project necessitated the training and recruitment of over 400 installation teams. The operator of the resulting network is Global-Teleport, the Russian Federation's leading VSAT operator and another Synterra daughter company. To manage the network the company uses its own hub Earth stations in Khabarovsk, Novosibirsk, Pavlovsky Posad and Moscow. Many of the communities in question are still without any kind of telecommunication infrastructure, with the result that the "school Internet" is used by all of the local inhabitants to access the outside world. This explains why the traffic figures for such schools are higher than average. Yet another positive outcome of the project has been the development of a Russian VSAT market, which has included the certification of some 1400 experts in VSAT terminal installation, commissioning and maintenance.

But the Russian project's main achievement has, of course, been to provide the general education system with an ICT infrastructure, thereby eliminating the digital divide affecting pupils in remote areas. Constituting, as it does, the first large-scale State experience of giving effect to each citizen's constitutional right to have access to information, it has laid a solid foundation for an information society that cannot be achieved without high-quality education and the assurance of equal and ubiquitous access to ICT. Last but not least, it has resulted in the establishment of a telecommunication infrastructure that enables the provision of new services to the public, thereby paving the way for the development of a high-technology society throughout the Russian Federation.