On 4th March 2005 a joint meeting of the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communication of the Russian Federation and the Government of St. Petersburg was held on the issues of information and communication technologies development in St. Petersburg.  The meeting was held under the chairmanship of the Minister of Information Technologies and Communication of the Russian Federation L.D. Reiman and the Governor of St. Petersburg V.I. Matviyenko.

Besides, the meeting was attended by I.I. Klebanov, Plenipotentiary of the President of the Russian Federation in the Northwestern Federal District; B.D. Antonyuk, Deputy Minister of Information Technologies and Communication of the Russian Federation; V.G. Matyukhin, Head of the Federal Agency for Information Technologies; members of the Government of St. Petersburg, responsible employees of the  Ministry of Information Technologies and Communication of Russia, managers of major enterprises and organizations of the information and communication industry of St. Petersburg.  V.A. Akulich, General Manager of OJSC NWT, spoke on the first issue of the agenda ‘On the Programme for Providing Telecommunication Services to Residents of St. Petersburg for the years 2005-2007’.

After discussing his report, the following decisions were taken at the joint session: 

To approve the Programme for Providing Telecommunication Services to Residents of St. Petersburg for the years 2005-2007;

To give instructions to the Committee for Finance, City Property Management Committee and the Informatization and Communication Committee to consider within a month’s time the possibility of participation in the Programme of the Government of St. Petersburg (in respect of co-financing of the Programme, provision of premises and land plots to OJSC NWT for communication facilities and means on privileged lease conditions, etc.);  

To apply to I.I. Klebanov, Plenipotentiary of the President of the Russian Federation in the Northwestern Federal District with a request to render assistance to OJSC North-West Telecom in returning the accounts receivable of the federal budget for communication services provided to privileged categories of citizens (as of 01.01.05 the accounts receivable amounted to RUR 1530 million, including 964.1 million roubles due to the  Petersburg Telephone Network branch of OJSC NWT).   

The key goal of the Programme is to satisfy the demand of St. Petersburg residents for up-to-date telecommunication services and to eliminate the queue existing in the city for telephone connections. The programme provides for that the queue existing in the city as of 1st January 2005 for telephone connections (about 57,000 citizens) will be liquidated during 2005-2006, while the queue on the whole (taking into account the annual growth of the number of new applications for telephone connections – 28,000) will be liquidated before 2008. For Great Patriotic War veterans and survivors of the blockade of Leningrad this problem will be resolved soon: all applications of such veterans and survivors will be satisfied by the 60th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War. If the Programme is implemented successfully, starting from 2008, all newly filed applications for telephone connections will be satisfied within 6 months.      

According to the plan, about 195,400 new lines will be commissioned in the  city before the year 2008. This is sufficient to eliminate the existing queue and to preclude its accumulation in subsequent years.  The total planned volume of investment in the implementation of this 3 year Programme from the budget of OJSC NWT will amount to approximately RUR 2.6 billion.     

The draft Programme also includes a number of territories and settlements with a high cost of providing telephone connections. There are about 55 of them. Usually these are territories remote from telephone exchanges and often scarcely populated, such as Levashovo, Novo-Devyatkino, Gorelovo, Lomonosov, Shushary, Khvoyny settlement, Lenino, etc.