Rostelecom, Russia’s national long-distance telecommunications operator, will provide the Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences located in Chernogolovka with integrated infocommunications services including long-distance and international telephony, IP-traffic transmission etc.

To ensure high quality of services, Rostelecom’s Central Branch is to construct a fiber-optic line for interconnection of Chernogolovka Research Center to the Company’s backbone network via dedicated digital channel (155 Mbps capacity). In addition, Chernogolovka Research Center node will be connected to the Moscow node of FREEnet (The network For Research, Education, and Engineering). The connection is to be established in the framework of the pilot project of setting up Chernogolovka IT-park.

The new fiber-optic line, crossing strategic A107 Federal Highway Road, is to be connected to Rostelecom’s network. Directional drilling has been confirmed as the method of crossing. The project implementation will amount to approximately RUR 6,000,000.

A decision to set up one of the pilot Russian IT-parks in Chernogolovka was made at a joint meeting of Russia’s Information Technologies & Communications Ministry and the Moscow regional authorities.

An open contest, announced by the Chernogolovka Research Center, later in the third quarter of 2005 selected the telecommunications company to organize a fiber-optic line for the Center’s computer network.

Rostelecom’s General Director Dmitry Yerokhin commented: “Provision of integrated services as a part of setting up an IT-park is one more important project of our Company, which has always paid special attention to the progress of national science. Furthermore, we are confident that the new fiber-optic line will enable Rostelecom to increase the number of channels in this direction while raising quality and reliability levels.”

FREEnet (Russian network For Research, Education, and Engineering) is a non-commercial, academic and research IP network for science and education.