RUSSIA'S EVERY BACKWOODS AREA TO GET MEANS OF COMMUNICATION BY 2008

MOSCOW, October 26 (RIA Novosti) - By 2008 every faraway, hard-of-access and backwoods area in Russia will have means of communication, Boris Antonyuk, deputy minister for information technologies and communication, has said on Tuesday.

"If the mechanism of universal service is launched, we'll resolve the problem by 2008", he said.

This mechanism, introduced by the new law On Communication, intends establishing telephone communication in remote regions, rural areas and the opening of Internet collective access points in some of them.

Now, about 50,000 populated locations have no communication at all, Antonyuk recalled.

The universal service will bring telephony to all of them and open points of Internet collective access in 20,000 localities.

Antonyuk said that, if the problem is resolved by 2008, country-wide telephone communication is planned to begin.

He also said that telephone communication is planned to be funded by deductions from all communication operators at two percent of their earnings minus receipts from telephone traffic.

The size of deductions has already been considered with market members, he said.

The fund of the universal service is planned to be about seven billion roubles annually (approximately 240 million dollars).