Beltelecom was founded on 3 July 1995, and today, sixteen years later, we are glad to inform you about the results of our work in 2011 which was special for all of us. It should be noted that we completed it successfully, breathed life into many our projects.
First of all, we adjusted our plans so as to stay up to scratch, despite the crisis phenomena. Through building up and upgrading the capacity of our infrastructure, as well as marketing actions, we increased sales volume of communication services and provided new opportunities for many regions.
Thus, we built an extensive telecommunication network throughout the country, long-distance fiber-optic communication lines (FOL), which extend more than 29 thousand kilometers. We give particular emphasis to the development of communications in rural areas, trying to provide the entire population with telephony and the Internet. Moreover, regional IP TV ZALA subscribers are now a significant part of our subscriber base, which exceeds 430,000.
Telephone services make it possible to automatically establish telephone connections between subscribers. The development of modern communication technologies today - it is not a technical problem, it is a matter of choice of our citizens. Demand creates supply, and as long as the number of those wishing to install a fixed telephone is not decreasing, we can say that the plain ordinary telephone service is still relevant. In 2011, Beltelecom increased its fixed telephone base to 4,170,000 subscriber numbers (including subscribers of wireless subscriber access WLL), having installed more than 70 thousand telephones only this year.
As for the broadband Internet access brand byfly, in 2011 we were able to take care of our customers and successfully keep prices down for tariff plans. The beginning of the year was marked with the wonderful event - the byfly brand won in the consumer nomination of the contest “Brand of the Year 2010” in the category “Internet Service Provider”.
Today byfly is the strongest brand in the broadband Internet access market. We already have more than 1 million 150 thousand subscribers, and we plan to increase this figure in 2012. In the outgoing year we continued to develop a network of Wi-Fi public access points: now Beltelecom`s network amounts to more than 1,100 hot spots.
We actively participated in all major and important for the telecom industry events (TIBO-2011, ITU TELECOM WORLD-2011, BAKUTELL-2011). The rapid growth of the Internet service market demanded almost threefold increase of the capacity of external Internet gateway of the country from 67 Gbit/s to 200 Gbit/s.
In the outgoing year, the representative of Beltelecom was the Chairman of the RCC Telecommunication Operators Board, which was held in Kiev (Ukraine). Sergei P. Popkov, Director General of RUE Beltelecom, summed up the activities of the RCC telecommunication Operators Board for twenty years.
It is worth mentioning the important technical solution launched in 2011, i.e. the beginning of construction of a passive optical network xPON.
xPON (Passive Optical Network) is a modern technology of construction of optical fiber networks on the principle of “Fiber to the home”, allowing to increase the “last mile” bandwidth to 1 Gbit/s, to ensure high quality video transmission and to provide new services.
Finally, it should be noted that Beltelecom is one of the few telecommunication operators which implement challenging projects necessary for the development of overall telecommunication potential of the country.
Reliability, stability and prosperity are pledge of success of our cooperation. Please accept our sincere congratulations on the incoming New Year 2012! May the incoming year be full of new plans, creative ideas, good news and financial success!