OJSC North-West Telecom completed ahead of schedule the Program for the Provision of Telecommunications Services for St. Petersburg Residents for the Years 2005-2007 which was approved by Russian Federation Minister of Information Technologies and Communications L.D. Reyman and St. Petersburg Governor V.I. Matviyenko at a meeting in Smolny on March 4, 2005 (??.?????-????? ?? 04.03.2005).

As the result of implementation of this Program, in 2005-2006, more than 122 thousand telephone installation requests were satisfied in the city and the waiting list for telephone installation* which included 56.8 thousand requests as of January 1, 2005 ceased to exist. By January 1, 2006, the number of requests registered with the St. Petersburg branch of OJSC NWT fell to 19.3 thousand and as of January 1, 2007 the current waiting list included only 5.6 thousand requests registered in late 2006. Now the requests for telephone installation in St. Petersburg are satisfied within 6 months after receipt.

When the Program was signed, the Great Patriotic War veterans and invalids as well as individuals enjoying the same rights (decorated with the medal “For the Defense of Leningrad”, sign “Resident of Besieged Leningrad”) formed a special category on the waiting list. For these people, the waiting list for telephone installation was eliminated as early as in the 1st quarter 2005. In 2005-2006, the Company satisfied a total of 1,148 telephone installation requests from Great Patriotic War veterans and invalids as well as individuals enjoying the same rights.

In the course of implementation of the Program, active efforts were made to install telephone facilities in remote districts of St. Petersburg and upgrade the city’s telecommunications networks for broadening the range and improving the quality of communications services. The St. Petersburg branch of OJSC NWT upgraded and constructed telephone lines in about 55 remote and often little-populated districts of the city and suburbs that lacked both number and line capacity for a long time. These included Pargolovo, Levashevo, Novo-Devyatkino, Gorelovo, Lomonosov, Shushary, Khvoyny, Lenino etc.

 While implementing the Program NWT switched to digital equipment all decade-step exchanges (30 units) and 27 crossbar exchanges with the total capacity over 214 thousand numbers. The digitalization level of the telephone network in St. Petersburg rose from 40% as of January 1, 2005 to 50.5 % as of January 1, 2007.

The total investments made by NWT for the Program implementation in 2005-2006 amounted to 3.2 billion rubles and a total of 4 billion rubles was spent on the installation of telephone facilities in the Northern Capital in 2004-2006.

The Program for the Provision of Telecommunications Services for St. Petersburg Residents is an important milestone in the development of the city’s telecommunications sector – not only because the waiting list for telephone installation was finally eliminated after many years of existence, but also because large-scale works were performed during these years to upgrade and digitalize the telephone network, facilitating the creation of a multi-service communications network in St. Petersburg and contributing to the successful development of up-to-date services based on broadband access technology. Two major projects implemented on the basis of the multi-service communications network in 2005-2006 are the Avangard service, the ADSL broadband Internet access for individuals with more than 80 thousand users in St. Petersburg from February 2006, and the Alliance Pro project, the package offer for organizations, including telephony and broadband Internet.

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The city waiting list for telephone installation is the list of individuals who have no access to the general network, applied to one or more communications operators for the individual apartment telephone installation contract and are on the communications operator’s records for more than 6 months. The individuals who have access to the general network through at least one operator and have at least one individual apartment telephone installed are removed from the city waiting list for telephone installation (clause 1.6 of the Program).