February 19 2009, Moscow: COMSTAR – United TeleSystems (COMSTAR-UTS, LSE: CMST), the leading provider of integrated telecommunication solutions in Russia and the CIS, announces a trial launch of its next generation transport network.

At the moment, the Group’s Moscow transport network includes supercore acting as a key network element and interconnected backbones belonging to the Group’s members, MGTS and COMSTAR-Direct. Integrated transport infrastructure of COMSTAR-UTS has a double-star topology that provides full redundancy making it possible to improve network reliability. The network uses DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing).

Total investments in the project were made in 2008 and amounted to approximately $10 million.

As a result COMSTAR-UTS has boosted capacity of its Moscow transport network from 40 Gbps up to 400 Gbps. This means that it took less than a year to increase the speed 10-fold.

Under construction of new transport network in Moscow, COMSTAR-UTS’ experts have created a single connection point for external networks and regional branches of the Group as well as implemented a centralized management & monitoring system.

COMSTAR-UTS started construction of the transport network on spring 2008. The supercore is built using Cisco CRS-1 routers. The equipment was delivered, installed and pre-commissioned by Sitronix. DWDM equipment was delivered and pre-commissioned by ECI.

Alexander Kirillov, Technology Vice President of COMSTAR-UTS, says, "Today we see exponential growth of traffic which is likely to continue in the nearest future. Prior to commercial launch, COMSTAR-UTS has tested the network and discovered a significantly improved bandwidth, so now we can completely meet constantly growing needs of Internet users. The existing transport architecture of COMSTAR-UTS supports further enhancement of capacity without large investment and considerable human involvement."

COMSTAR-UTS is going to launch its transport network in the second half of 2009.