Russia to lay fiber optics communication line to the Crimea
On May 31, the Russian company Chitatekhenergo announced the procurement of work to increase the capacity of the fiber optic lines in the annexed Crimea, as reported by Hromadske with reference to the official Russian public procurement website.
The winner of the tender will be announced on June 28.
According to the documentation, before the 24th of August 2017, the contractor must complete “turnkey” work on the creation of a communication line using DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) technology.
The channel capacity of the completed digital information transfer system is to be 200 GB/s with the option of being increased to 4 Tb/s. The preliminary cost of the contract is almost 68 million rubles (1.20 million USD).
“The DWDM equipmemnt is intended for the development of the transportation network of Chitatekhenergo in the context of expanding the unified technological communication network of the electric power industry,” the competition documentation of Chitatekhenergo states.
Despite the fact that the documents are concerned with work on a communication line between Rostov and Simferopol, the text contains a number of references to the “Federal program of development of the Crimea and Sevastopol”, Krasnodar Kray, not the temporarily occupied peninsula, is specified as the service delivery location.
On May 31, the Ukrainian company, Volya, which works in annexed Sevastopol and the Crimea under the name Telesistemy, reportedly complied with the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s decree and blocked the access of its users in Sevastopol territory to such Russian online services of Yandex, mail.ru, and social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki.