Economic and geographical prerequisites for the creation of an international telecommunications hub in Irkutsk

With the transition of the Russian Federation to the digital economy, there is a problem of identifying telecommunication hubs that will become the poles of a new economic growth. In existing scientific publications on this issue, only existing hubs are studied. However, the search for new growth poles requires determining the prerequisites for creating hubs. The article presents the results of the first-ever study on the identification of economic and geographic prerequisites for the creation of an international telecommunication hub. To identify the desired prerequisites, we used the methodology for assessing the infocommunication-geographical position of the city in the network and streaming approaches. Using the example of Irkutsk, it is shown that the prerequisites are the position of the city in the network of trunk lines of telecommunications, the system of transcontinental information flows and the territorial structure of the digital economy. Five priority projects were proposed to improve the prerequisites for the creation of a telecommunication hub in Irkutsk.