Sprint Corp’s Sprint Networks venture has established another local node in Perm in the Urals. The new Sprint agent will enable local enterprises to access Sprint and other international databases and to send and receive facsimile messages, telexes and electronic mail messages worldwide. According to Ludmila Ribalkina, Sprint Perm general director, the reliability of the Sprint network will be the main selling point of the new service. Sprint Networks is a joint venture part owned by Sprint International part owned by the state owned Rosstel company. It has made considerable headway in the last 12 months by offering this kind of basic data communications service for local currency and now has 25 local nodes. Although the market in Moscow and St Petersburg is now crowded, most cities in the Russian interior do not have any form of international access via the state telephone network.
