Smart High-Rises Across Siberia: The Kluch Digital Ecosystem Is Reshaping Housing Services
In 2025, the digital transformation of residential housing across Siberia entered a new phase. Nearly 200 newly built apartment buildings in the region were equipped with intelligent services from the Rostelecom Kluch ecosystem.
A Comprehensive Approach
This expansion raised the total number of “smart” apartment buildings in the Siberian Federal District to 1,250, representing nearly 20% growth year over year. The fastest progress has been recorded in Altai Krai, the Altai Republic, Zabaykalsky Krai, and Buryatia, where the number of connected buildings increased by more than 30%.
The Novosibirsk Region remains the regional leader in deployment, with Kluch technologies already operating in 332 multi-story residential buildings. Overall, the platform’s services now cover residents of nearly 3,700 buildings across Siberia. Managing access, security, and utility-related services through a single mobile application is becoming a new everyday reality for Siberian residents.
The platform’s success is driven by a comprehensive service offering that goes far beyond basic intercom functionality. In addition to Smart Intercoms, the most widely used service, the ecosystem includes integrated video surveillance with archive storage for up to 60 days, smart barriers with license plate recognition, access control systems, and smart meters. All services are unified within a single mobile application, which residents use on average 31 times per month.
Expansion Continues
The project is set to continue scaling domestically. Growth will extend not only to newly constructed buildings but, notably, to the existing housing stock. The technology enables modernization of older apartment buildings, improving safety and comfort without requiring large-scale reconstruction.
Solutions proven in Russia, combined with the platform’s flexible architecture, are laying the groundwork for exporting these technologies to CIS countries and the Eurasian Economic Union, where smart city development programs are also gaining momentum.
Further integration with government digital services, including housing and utilities accounting systems, is expected, alongside continued development of video analytics. This will enable not only faster incident response but also predictive capabilities, helping optimize the operations of property management companies and municipal services.
From Testing to Mass Deployment
The evolution of Rostelecom Kluch from an initial concept into an ecosystem used by hundreds of thousands of households reflects the broader digitalization trend within Russia’s housing and utilities sector.
The system was announced in July 2019. By November 2020, sales of the integrated solution had begun in the Moscow metropolitan area, while the first smart intercoms were deployed in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
By mid-2021, more than 165,000 apartments had been connected to the service. A major milestone followed in June 2022, when Kluch was included in the Russian Ministry of Digital Development’s registry of domestic software, underscoring its status as a fully homegrown solution. At that point, the platform was already used by 300,000 households.
By 2024, the platform’s geographic footprint had expanded to 335 cities nationwide, while the number of installed smart devices, including intercoms, barriers, and meters, exceeded 120,000 units. In 2024, Rostelecom announced a pilot integration with smart intercoms from a third-party manufacturer, Sokol+, signaling a transition toward a more open ecosystem. By early 2025, the platform covered 636,000 households across Russia.
A Digitalization Trend Taking Hold
The steady growth of smart apartment buildings across Siberia is not a one-off initiative but clear evidence of a deep and irreversible shift toward digitalization in Russia’s housing and utilities sector. The success of the Rostelecom Kluch ecosystem demonstrates strong public demand for modern IT solutions that address tangible needs by enhancing security, saving time, and reducing resource consumption.
The digital infrastructure being built into residential buildings today is becoming the foundation for future smart cities. Given current momentum, by 2028–2030 the share of multi-apartment buildings with integrated intelligent services in major Russian regions could confidently exceed 30–40%. This creates substantial opportunities for domestic IT developers, system integrators, and service providers, shaping a major new sector at the intersection of technology, urban development, and everyday life.
