OREANDA-NEWS. On 25 April 2008 was announced, that at the end of March, Sibirtelecom finished the second stage of the federal program 'Universal Communication Services’ in Omsk Region. According to it, all settlements of Omsk Region were equipped with telephones. The total number of pay stations installed in Omsk Region is 1,536.

Starting from 2006, Sibirtelecom OJSC implements the program of development of universal service in Siberia. ‘Universal services make it possible to reduce the telecommunication gap between cities and distant villages, which are almost completely deprived of modern communication channels’, - Dmitry Selivanov, Project Management Director of Sibirtelecom OJSC thinks. – ‘This is one of the priority social projects realized by our company’. 

A pay station provides both incoming and outgoing communication. The cost of one minute of local telephone connection by means of a pay station is 43 kopecks. A card with an integrated microchip is used as a payment means, and can be used in any similar pay station in Russia.

This project made it possible to install telephone communication in distant settlements of Ust-Ishim, Tarsk, Tevris and Sedelnikovo districts, which had had no telephone communication before, as well as settlements located at more than 80 km distance from district centers.