February 12, 2008, Moscow: COMSTAR – United TeleSystems JSC (COMSTAR-UTS, LSE: CMST), the leading supplier of integrated telecommunication solutions in Russia and the CIS, and Synterra, a telecom operator providing national coverage, announce an increased inter-network interface capacity allowing Internet traffic transfer.

Under the agreement between COMSTAR-Direct CJSC, a member of COMSTAR-UTS, and Synterra CJSC the interface capacity has been increased from 1 up to 3 Gbps.

The agreement concerning higher network connectivity has extended the partnership between two leading Russian telcos. Before that, in the end of 2007, COMSTAR-UTS actively participated in the Synterra's project to deploy the telecommunication infrastructure for the next generation state passport & visa system. COMSTAR-UTS' affiliate – MGTS – provided redundant ADSL lines for the most Moscow sites of a single VPN.

Vitaly Slizen, Director General of Synterra, says, "Our mutually beneficial cooperation consolidates the partners' achievements. We want to further extend our relationships with COMSTAR-UTS – we are going to choose the company as the main last-mile provider in Moscow for the majority of our federal projects".

Sergey Pridantsev, President of COMSTAR-UTS JSC, says, "We are glad to extend our cooperation with one of the leading Russian operators. Together with Synterra Group we are going to launch large-scale projects in Moscow. It's quite possible that the results of our successful cooperation will be useful for Russian regions".