At present Comstar provides Wi-Fi services in the three heavily trafficked underground stations -- "Okhotny' Riyad", "Teatral'naya" and "Ploschad' Revolyutsii". The Company plans to cover all interchange stations in the Moscow metro and launch similar services in St. Petersburg, where the Wi-Fi network is already undergoing tests at two stations. The service targets pocket PC and Smartphone users, who are already in the habit of using these devices on the metro. There are twenty one hot-spots covering an area of two square kilometers, which includes waiting halls, passages, escalators and entrance halls. Tunnels in between stations are not yet covered by this network. At this stage the network capacity allows for the simultaneous access of 48 users at a speed of 128 Kbit/s. Comstar plans to increase the capacity of the network in the future, following increased demand for the service.
The cost of a one hour Internet session will be 5 CU (currency units) and will be calculated on a per minute basis. The login and password will be valid for one year from the date of authorization. Payments are accepted via prepaid Wi-Fi -- Comstar cards or an SMS-authentication service, which is available for MTS subscribers and which is expected to become the most popular with metro users. Since the launch of this service six month ago, over 10% of all logins and passwords have been generated via SMS-authentication.
Dmitry Dronov, Comstar vice-president marketing commented: "The metro network has a higher potential concentration of users compared to other hotspots. We are certain that the project will be successful, considering the position of the network and the fact that most of the sold portable devices already support Wi-Fi.
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Photo of Moscow subway by Sloppy Stephen. Creative Commons License Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0
