On October 30, 2007, OJSC North-West Telecom arranged a press tour for the media of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast. During the press tour, representatives of the region’s leading mass media visited several structural units of North-West Telecom, and had a chance to ask the Company’s top management a few questions at a briefing.

First, the journalists visited the “ADSL digital heart”, the control room of the Data Transmission Department, St. Petersburg Subsidiary of N.W.Telecom, at 14 Sinopskaya Quay. It is one of the largest multiservice network centers of N.W. Telecom in the North-Western region. The Company uses it to provide mass services of broadband Internet access to individuals and corporations applying the ADSL, under the Avangard and Alliance PRO trademarks.

In the same building, the journalists were shown the “printing line” of St. Petersburg Subsidiary, a set of several professional high-speed printers, enveloping machine, and paper cutting and stacking equipment. Here they daily print out over 2 million bills and other accounting documents for subscribers of St. Petersburg Subsidiary and Leningrad Oblast Subsidiary of N.W.Telecom. The media people also visited the Power Department, which provides uninterruptible and trouble-free power supply to one of the Company’s largest, power-consuming, and strategically important facilities, i.e. the Main Zonal Telecommunication Engineering Center (MZTEC) of St. Petersburg Subsidiary of N.W.Telecom. The annual power consumption of MZTEC is over 11 million kWh. Next, the media tour team visited the N.W.Telecom building in Bolshaya Morskaya Street. It is an ancient, historically valuable building, where the journalists saw the operation of the city’s largest enquiry service “09” and the universal commercial information service “009”.

The culmination of the press tour was a briefing with the top management of N.W.Telecom attended by Vladimir A. Akulich, General Manager of N.W.Telecom; Oleg V. Popov, Associate General Manager and Business Manager; Oleg A. Semanov, Associate General Manager and Technical Director; Venera A. Khusnutdinova, Associate General Manager and Economy & Finance Manager; Ella I. Tomilina, Associate General Manager (Corporate Relations); and Leonid Z. Tufrin, Regional Manager and St. Petersburg Subsidiary Manager.

The key topic of the briefing was of course the first anniversary of N.W.Telecom and the business results of the united interregional company. Besides, the journalists got answers to relevant questions about further development of the telecommunication industry and prospects of N.W.Telecom, new services launched, and competition on the telecommunications market.

Finalizing his speech, General Manager Vladimir Akulich noted, “North-West Telecom is a recognized communication service operator, which has been operating on the market not for five years, but rather for 125 years, and this is very impressive and serious. Among our functions is not only operation in profit-making market segments, but also a great social responsibility, to an extent that is not undertaken by any alternative operator oriented at high-income corporate customers. We believe that everyone in our great country deserves high-quality advanced communication. Now the pace gained by Russia in terms of economic development, and the pace shown by the telecommunication industry, give us confidence that we are going to witness and to contribute to a situation when communications in Russia is not second to communications in Europe, or America, or anywhere in the world in any parameter.”