September 28, 2009, Moscow: COMSTAR – United TeleSystems (COMSTAR-UTS, LSE: CMST), the largest operator of integrated telecommunication services in Russia and the CIS, announces completion of the second stage of the Moscow transport network upgrade.

As part of the network upgrade project launched in 2008, COMSTAR-UTS is replacing outdated Riverstone equipment installed on communication nodes by the state of the art Cisco equipment. In 2008, at the first stage 9 data transmission nodes were replaced, while at the second recently completed stage another 20 nodes were upgraded. Third and the last stage implies upgrade of 50 communication nodes; it is to be completed in spring, 2010. Sections of the communication network upgraded at the first and second stages of the project have already been commercially launched. The project also provides for increasing the number of joints with the regional network segment and their extension. This will bridge the digital gap between Moscow and the Moscow Region and will allow provision of high-quality VPN services to customers having offices in the two regions.

The current upgrade will provide Moscow users of COMSTAR-UTS services – who are mostly corporate customers – a wider bandwidth for all communication services they get via virtual private networks (IP VPN) created for them. The capacity of the data transmission nodes that have already been upgraded increases ten fold up to 10 Gbps. Besides, this project will extend the communication network geography enabling service provision to a larger number of customers.

“Reliability is the crucial aspect of any telecom operator’s network. Upgrading the network for corporate customers and replacing equipment guaranty high-quality and reliable connection in any network section. Besides, state of the art equipment gives us wider opportunities to provide value-added services. Finally, it is also important that COMSTAR-UTS network coverage in Moscow will increase and a joint with the communication network of the Moscow Region subsidiary will appear,” Alexander Kirillov, Technology Vice President of COMSTAR-UTS, says.

COMSTAR-UTS network is the basic part of the common transport network of the Group in Moscow comprising transport backbones of COMSTAR-UTS, MGTS and COMSTAR-Direct interconnected via the key network element – the supercore. The infrastructure has the double star topology that makes the network more reliable as the complete redundancy is possible. The network uses dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), its total capacity is 400 Gbps. Now, the network is running in a test mode.