MegaFon, a leading Russian mobile operator, has announced a $130 million commitment to building and upgrading the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics’ telecommunications infrastructure.
In an exchange last week with the Russian news agency 1Prime, Tigran Pogosyan, MegaFon’s deputy CEO for strategic ventures and director of the firm’s Sochi-2014 project, said that in addition to the $130 million his company, an official Sochi Olympics telecom partner since 2009, also intends to provide another $100 million or so for sponsor services prior to and during the Games.
According to Pogosyan, the mobile operator is building new fibre optical communication lines (FOCLs), base stations, and a stand-by technical center in this region in Southwest Russia.
By next year, MegaFon hopes to complete new installations that will offer high-quality telecom services to the entire Greater Sochi area, which previously had poor or no mobile coverage.
MegaFon is responsible for ensuring reliable mobile, voice, and Internet services, fine-tuning call center operations, and selling modems for the Games, while the other major telecom provider for the Olympics, Rostelecom, is expected to take care of landline communications, TV transmission, Wi-Fi services, and general data processing.
