henry@garp.mit.edu (Henry Mensch) (03/14/90)
Pinched from the [New York Times] -- US Sprint Communications Co. announced four moves Wednesday to expand operations overseas, including a preliminary agreement to provide high-quality international telephone links to the Soviet Union. Sprint said it had signed an agreement to create a venture in Moscow with Central Telegraph, which provides long-distance telephone and telex services in the Soviet Union, and the Latvian Academy of Sciences. The new company, called Telenet U.S.S.R., will import and operate an advanced switching center that will use satellite communications to offer voice and high-speed data exchanges, said Susan W. Williams, Sprint's vice president for international services. Sprint will provide the switching center while Central Telegraph, a unit of the Soviet Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, will supply office space, pay employee salaries and make local telephone connections available, Ms. Williams said. Operations are scheduled to begin by the end of the year, Sprint said. Sprint also said that it had joined several Asian and European concerns in planning a $260 million fiber-optic cable project. Scheduled for completion in mid-1993, the system would link Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore and connect with trans-Pacific cables serving the United States and Canada. In addition, Sprint said it was forming a venture with Elektrisk Bureau AS, Norway's largest maker of electronic components, to sell data communications products in Scandinavia and that it had opened new switching centers in London and Amsterdam. # Henry Mensch / <henry@garp.mit.edu> / E40-379 MIT, Cambridge, MA # <hmensch@uk.ac.nsfnet-relay> / <henry@tts.lth.se> / <mensch@munnari.oz.au>