OREANDA-NEWS. October 20, 2010. Sibirtelecom celebrates the fifth birthday of the Webstream brand used to provide broadband Internet access. For the past five years the Company has significantly increased its subscriber base of Internet users, has introduced new attractive tariff plans, has become a pioneer in promoting new state-of-the-art technologies of Internet access. Now Sibirtelecom is one of the top ten biggest Internet providers in Russia, occupying 62% of the regional Internet service market in the Siberian Federal District. The number of Webstream subscribers exceeds 700 thousands.

During the past 5 years the demand of subscribers for high speed channels and high connection quality changed by leaps and bounds. Sibirtelecom changed along with the subscribers. Just a couple of years ago the main technology of data transfer was the ADSL technology, with which prospect of the development of new services. The Company achieved a qualitatively new level in April 2010, when it was the first one in Siberia to start providing Internet services according to GPON technology. The new technology makes it possible to increase the traffic capacity of the network up to 1 Gb/s, which is one hundred times higher than the data transmission speed according to the ADSL technology. While implementing the project of introduction of the new technology of GPON high speed Internet, the Company exceeded the mark of 10 thousand subscribers.

“During the period of providing the Webstream service the number of Company subscribers grew over 10 times. For example, in 2006 the Webstream service was used by 65 thousand subscribers, - emphasized Ivan Dadykin, General Director of Sibirtelecom OJSC. – Today the Company provides services to over 700 thousand users, while by the end of this year they will be already 1 million. Our plans for subscriber growth became possible due to the created multiservice network, development of GPON and ETTH technologies, commissioning of a single data-center of the Company, increasing of the attractiveness of the Sibnet.ru content-resource and improving subscriber loyalty programs.”

The volume of investments of Sibirtelecom OJSC in the development of Internet services in 2010 in the Siberian region will be 3.8 milliard rubles; 1.9 milliard rubles have been already used. A significant part of the funds was used to build GPON networks in 10 regions of the Siberian Federal District (in all regions of SFD, except for the Republic of Tyva and the Republic of Altai).

The Company pursues a flexible tariff policy, which increases the possibility of access of users to Internet resources. During 2010 the Company reduced Internet tariffs on average by 34%. The Company is also taking effort to expand the range of additional services, to increase the quality of services and efficiency of the technical support provided to its subscribers.

Sibirtelecom congratulates its subscribers with the first anniversary and invites them to take participation in a festive event called “5 years with Webstream”.