This December, North-West Telecom connected the 50,000th subscriber of the Avangard service in St. Petersburg. Sergey Ludzsky, the 50,000th user of the broadband Internet, was granted free Avangard-trademark access to the Internet for the whole year 2007, and received a gift from NWT.

Development of broadband Internet access services under the Avangard trade name is a promising sector North-West Telecom’s business, now successfully implemented all over the North-Western Federal District.

The Avangard-trademark Internet access service was launched in St. Petersburg in February 2006, to be further spread to Pskov, Novgorod, Leningrad, Murmansk, Vologda, Archangel, and Kaliningrad Oblasts.

In all, NWT connected nearly 80,000 users in the North-West to Avangard in 2006. Of these, 50,000 are based in St. Petersburg. To expert estimates, in the eight months of promotion of the new product, North-West Telecom won about 40% of the broadband access market in the NWFD, and 30% of the market in St. Petersburg.

Offering its customers the new Avangard service, NWT has developed a three-level customer support scheme providing for information, consulting, and fast handling of any problems that users may face via the specialized website https://www.avangard-dsl.ru, via its maintenance centers, and at its Customer Service Centers. To satisfy the subscribers’ needs and priorities, NWT has developed a broad range of tariff plans, including the ‘unrestricted use’ and ‘traffic included’ plans

The Petersburg subsidiary of NWT is already offering Avangard users a whole set of additional services such as games, data storage, virtual photo album, private diary, and fixed IP address.

In the future, the Company will continue developing the broadband Internet access service over the entire territory of the North-West of Russia, and extending the list of additional services and abilities provided under the ADSL technology.