This is from your old friend in St.Pete, Russia.

I'm writing this in an old Boeing 737, returning me from my almost three weeks long business trip to your country. From New York, NY up to Boston, MA and Dover, NH I went and then took the train down to Ewing, NJ and then flew to Gainesville, FL. Quite a trip for three weeks, isn't it?

It was my second trip to your country. The first one was in 1990. Back then, a few people I met planted seeds of my current telecommunications curiosity, but at that time CompuServe access was a luxury and Internet was purely academic, and BBS were hobbyists. (And there was one or two BBS in my country Russia and only academics from Moscow had tiny connection with Internet, available only for a few people and heavily controlled and we still had stable money and iron curtain just went down )

Boy, what a difference in 1995!

First - wherever I went, it took me 10 minutes to get the local CompuServe access phone number and I was on email fix (yes, I became an information junkie ;-)) all the time. My family back home was extremely happy. I kept them abreast of what's new in every department store in the neighborhood !

Second - EVERY household I went to had at least one computer, and all of them were either on Internet or other services.

Third - out of the four businesses I attended, two had WWW page and one even was close to establishing his own POP (of course it is Gordon Cook, your columnist and author of `The Cook Report on Internet', who runs T1 line to his business and has WWW page and soon will have POP)!

And one guy was even running electronic newspaper (Dave Carlson from the University of Florida with his `SunOne')!

Fourth - during my homestays in different cities, I managed to play around with almost all major providers in US telecommunications - I surfed the Net with Netcom, looked at AOL, read my mail daily through CompuServe and logged in to Prodigy and Delphi! What a variety of services and what a choice for a customer! And available any time, any place!

OK, let's look what awaits me in my dear St. Petersburg in this area?

First - we do have all major carriers - Sprint and Tymnet local access numbers now. So, the ones who used to use them in States can just change phone number in their laptop and here we go (it will be very disappointing, though, to look at one's bill afterwards! Over here, in Russia these services are VERY expensive...)

Second - there is at least 5 Internet POPs in my city and they are almost as cheap as what you guys have over here in the States. Several of them even dare to charge a flat rate of $30/mo and give discounts for the night time use (some disappointment here: my bill is usually up to $150/mo, but I practically `live' on the Net now - doing offshore programming with several US guys).

Third - we DO have online Internet access now and one can surf the Net from home. (But, boy, is it slow! Even at 14400 it looks much slower than what I experienced Netscaping from my friend's home at 9600).

And fourth - thanks to the Net, we can use all commercial networks who have telnet access. I telnet at 9600 bps to my Compuserve account and use it for hours daily, same for my Delphi account and Netcom account of my friend!

As one can see, we are still way behind in terms of variety of services and prices. But - and this is important - one can survive now even with limited access one may have in St. Pete and still use one's favorite services!

And with the amount of WWW sites around the World and online libraries and bookstores and even florists - life becomes bearable in St. Petersburg folks! Do come and see!

My plane will hopefully land soon and I may have my head spinning with customs and passport control so I'd better close. Just wanted to add, that thanks to the Net and magazines like Boardwatch the world becomes much smaller, making all of us closer, and isn't it great!

Sincerely,

Arcady Khotin
St.Petersburg, Russia
Internet: agkh@arcadia.spb.su
CI$: 75021,3120
Delphi: AKHOTIN

Arcady:

Thanks for the update from St. Petersburg. We would love some specifics such as contact information for the POP's in St. Pete.

Jack Rickard