@natalie I have friends. I can understand Russian. I hear people saying stuff.For context, Russia's Far East is pretty much an extractive colonial expanse. Most of the industrial investment in these parts went into the mining towns and the railway network necessary to get the mined products out and into factories. The mining systems were aggressively developed in 1950sā1960s, and much less so after Brezhnev's times. This sort of thing tends to leave a distinct pattern to a culture's technohistory.In contrast to some parts of Africa, where POTS telephone networks were allowed to fall into disrepair after the colonial authorists left, and then the developing local business pushed for building new cellphone networks to replace the old landlines ā Somaliland being a beautiful example ā, a quirk of Russian bureaucratic culture is it considers telephones rather important for getting arbitrary orders from Teh Up Above at a moment's notice, so there has always been money in maintaining Russia's telephone networks. And good maintenance can often ward off upgrades, depending.