That's all very instructive but really irrelevant to Russia...
It is highly relevant. As of the early 1990s, Russia's telecom infrastructure was a typical command and control one, with massive concentration at the domestic-international nodes and overall low levels of subscriber penetration as compared with the West. They have not torn it out and reengineered it to be like a typical Western infrastructure. Instead, they have built up from the old base. The concentration factors at the domestic-international nodes far exceeds that of a typical Western system, even today.