The international telephone and facsimile service provided by UK company Cable & Wireless for residents of the free economic zones of Nakhodka and Sakhalin began operating last month. Through its Komikom joint venture, Cables has organised a connection to the international telecommunications hub in Hong Kong. There are so far about 300 subscribers in the Nakhodka zone. Callers are charged $5 per minute. It specialises in providing communications facilities to oil companies developing the fields around the Sakhalin shelf. Its competitor Sprint International now offers its facsimile and electronic mail services in the Russian Far East. The services are being resold through the Russia-American joint venture Tandem (not to be confused with the computer manufacturer). So far the service has been demonstrated only in Khabarovsk but customers in Nakhodka and Vladivostock have also expressed an interest. Sprint is charging transmission costs of $24 per hour or customers can pay $150 per month without time charges. And an Italtel SpA digital telephone exchange has been used to expand the capacity of the telephone network at the town of Vyborg in Russia. The Telezarya joint venture installed an expansion unit to the town’s existing exchange which gives it an extra 7,000 numbers. Telezarya aims to establish a plant to produce these exchanges. Telezarya is a joint venture between Italtel and the Krasnaya Zarya Association St Petersburg. MSS, the consortium that is organising the Moscow mobile telephone network, has announced the tariffs it will charge for use of the new network. MSS says there will be an initial hook up fee of $995 with a monthly payment of $50 regardless of usage. Users will then be charged upwards of $0.6 per minute depending on the destination of calls. The service is expected to provide international access and some services for local currency. The MSS consortium consists of Moscow City Telephone Network, US West Inc, Millicom Inc, and Eye Micro-surgery (a Russian organisation with very diverse business interests) and the State Communications Design Institute. The hardware is being supplied by L M Ericsson Telefon AB and Nokia Oy. Meanwhile all 15,000 channels on the $72m Telecom Denmark optical fibre link between Copenhagen and St Petersburg were sold at auction in December. Buyers came form 25 separate organisations from Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, France, the US, Israel and the UK. The link is expected to be ready in mid-1993 says Izvestiya, which also says that the Russian association, Smolsal, is developing a communications service based on the Gonets class Soviet satellite. The plan is to launch 36 satellites on six Tsiklonmissiles. Testing will begin this year and full operation is planned for 1993-94. The members of Smolsal include The Institute for Applied Mechanics in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, and the former state organisation Soyuzmedinform.
