UrBC, Yekaterinburg, August 5, 2015. The Ural subscribers’ unpaid telephone bills now amount to as much as 2.5bn RUR against 2.1bn RUR a year earlier, the National Collection Service reports.

Users based in Yekaterinburg owe their telecommunications suppliers 490m RUR out of these 2.5bn RUR. As for the country on the whole, the overall amount of unpaid bills came to 28.7bn RUR in the first half of the year; this figure is expected to rise to 31.8bn RUR by the end of 2015.

Most of these debts are to mobile providers (25.7bn RUR), the rest being unpaid landline bills (1.5bn RUR), and Internet connection and IP TV bills (1.5bn RUR).

‘Based on the National Collection Service’s estimates, the amount of debt will keep on growing in the second half of the year as well as in the year 2016, despite the economic recession and the population’s shrinking incomes. However, this growth will be slower than before due to new, more affordable rates. The only factor that will affect the debt increase in the future is buying phone time on credit, which is a considerably smaller market segment,’ says the service’s Managing Director Anton Dianov.