Major defence enterprises and research institutes in the Ural region have founded a joint-stock company called Russian Fibre Optics: according to Anatoly Barulin, president of the company and chief engineer at the Technical Physics Research Institute, the company will develop and manufacture an original public communications system based on fibre optic technology called Sokol-N (Falcon-N); This will be the first Russian integrated system for use in public communications and it will handle transmission speeds up to 64Kbps; the company says the system is capable of providing telephone communications, 11 cable television channels, and 10 stereo radio channels for up to 9,600 subscribers.
