At the beginning of April, Netas Northern Electric Telecommunicasyon as, the joint venture between Turkish PTT and Northern Telecom Ltd of Canada, won a contract to supply a DMS 100/200 exchange to Southern Kazakhstan city of Kzyl-Orda. This exchange will provide 2,000 city lines and 1,740 trunk lines. The customer for this project was the Kzyl-Orda Regional Directorate of Telecommunications which will finance this project. The purchase is unprecedented in the very poor Aral Sea region of Kazakhstan. The tender was unofficial, but there were initially three participants: AT&T Corp, Alcatel NV and Netas. The estimated value of the project is around $1m and it is planned that the new switch will be working by November this year. It is not the first success of Netas in Kazakhstan. In 1995 the company won a contract to supply a switch to Leninsk, a small city in the Kzyl-Orda region, in which the famous Baikonur Space Center is based. In June this year Leninsk, now renamed Baikonur, was due to get 5,000 city lines and 690 trunk lines. The main maintenance and support provider for both of these is VESNET, a joint venture between Netas and the Pavlodar Radio Plant. Established in 1992, VESNET had $5m turnover in 1995, which it plans to double this year. Kamil Orman, General Director of VESNET, says there is growing demand for VESNET products, mainly switches for use in rural areas of Kazakhstan.
