How it started
History
Before 1990, the Ministry of Communications of the USSR provided telecommunications services. On 26 June 1990, the Ministry established a state-owned joint-stock company, Sovtelekom, which obtained the rights to operate the USSR's telecommunications network. On 30 December 1992, by order of the State Property Committee of Russia, a state-owned enterprise, Rostelecom, was established. It consisted of 20 state-owned long-distance and international call lines, as well as Intertelekom communication equipment.
Throughout the 1990s, the company, which was a part of Svyazinvest, was the sole long-distance operator in Russia. Alongside it, local companies operated in the different regions of Russia under the umbrella of Svyazinvest, while Rostelecom connected its networks. In 2001, these companies were merged to form several regional incumbent telecommunications operators: CentreTelecom, SibirTelecom, Dalsvyaz, Uralsvyazinform, VolgaTelecom, North-West Telecom, Southern Telecommunications Company, and Dagsvyazinform. In 2011, Svyazinvest was liquidated, with its regional subsidiaries merged into Rostelecom. In 2021, the company's revenue amounted to 351 billion rubles.
On 18 October 2006, "Rostelecom" received a certificate of quality of IP-MPLS network and became the ISP backbone. In December 2006, Rostelecom and the telecommunications company KDDI in Japan under the "Transit Europe - Asia" signed an agreement to build a line of Nakhodka - Naoetsu with total bandwidth of 640 Gbit/s instead of the previous 560 Mbit/s.
In 2023, Rostelecom stated that Chinese state-backed cyberattacks by several known advanced persistent threats were a top concern.
In December 2025, Rostelecom CEO Mikhail Oseevsky announced that the company's board of directors had approved plans for an initial public offering (IPO) of its cybersecurity subsidiary, Solar Group. Oseevsky stated that the company was targeting the first half of 2026 for the IPO, though the exact timing would depend on market conditions. He also noted that another subsidiary, RTC-Data Center (a joint venture with VTB Bank), was at a high level of readiness for its own listing, but its IPO was also contingent on the monetary market situation
From Wikipedia’s article on Rostelecom, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2