The Soviet Union’s plan to increase the number of telephone lines to a relatively modest 100m by the year 2005 (CI No 1,399) in fact represents a phenomenal task in that country, some of whose cabling was put in before the 1917 revolution, and now, according to The Independent, a report published by the Telecommunications Research Centre concludes that, at today’s rate of progress, it will not achieve this target in that time-scale at all. Nevertheless, the report predicts that Soviet spending on telecommunications will top $17,000m by 1995, and $23,000m by the end of the decade in the effort to get the waiting list for a connection down to one year – the list currently stands at 15m for the Soviet Union as a whole. Moreover, the success of the attempt at telestroika is further dependant on how far CoCom, the organisation responsible for placing restrictions on high technology goods to the Comecon countries, decides to relax restrictions on trading with the Soviet Union itself.
