SAN MATEO, California and MOSCOW, February 17 /PRNewswire/ --

- First Joint Deployment With Yandex Spamooborona Addresses Specific Russian Market Requirements

SAN MATEO, California and MOSCOW, February 17 /PRNewswire/ --

Bizanga, the global company behind the most scalable and full-featured email and message processing platform, today announced that COMSTAR-United TeleSystems (COMSTAR-UTS OJSC, LSE: CMST), a major operator of integrated telecommunications services in Russia and the CIS, has deployed the Bizanga Intelligent Message Processor (IMP) platform to manage and secure their email and messaging needs.

As the leading broadband Internet provider in Russia, COMSTAR-UTS was facing increasing challenges to manage the email and messaging needs of its massively growing customer base. With year-over-year growth exceeding 52%, COMSTAR-UTS (trademark STREAM) broadband subscribers were being targeted by spammers, resulting in disproportional undesirable traffic buildup. After intensive tests, COMSTAR-UTS chose the Bizanga IMP platform for its ability to address its scaling needs, its integration with Yandex Spamooboronoa, its current Anti-Spam content filter, and its management and reporting capabilities.

Before we implemented the Bizanga IMP in our network we had to regularly add more servers to handle the load, said Victor Belov, Director, service platforms and networks of COMSTAR-UTS. The incredibly quick implementation has yielded a system that now allows us to easily scale to meet our customer's demands. The combination with Yandex' leading Anti-Spam solution protects our infrastructure and our customers.

With a specific focus on a more green, environment-friendly setup, the reduction of the hardware footprint by more than 80% with the corresponding decrease in administration overhead provided unarguable financial advantages to COMSTAR-UTS. The detailed statistics and reports of the Bizanga IMP further supplied COMSTAR-UTS with an unprecedented visibility of its email and messaging activities, allowing for even better management of its internal resources.

With the fastest growing Internet population in Europe and one of the largest nation in the world, Russian service providers face unique challenges, said Jérôme Lecat, CEO of Bizanga. As a global company with a local focus we pride ourselves on delivering the solutions needed to address these specific requirements with local partners.

About Bizanga

Bizanga is the global company that developed the most scalable and full-featured E-mail message processing and security platform, the Intelligent Message Processor(R) (IMP). The IMP can be deployed to protect an E-mail infrastructure from blended threats including spam, viruses, denial-of-service and harvest attacks. It can also be used to perform parental control, compliance/encryption services or simply to manage infrastructure migration or new service deployment. Designed especially for service providers, the IMP is extremely easy to integrate with existing infrastructure, including provisioning systems and message store. IMPs handle E-mail for millions of mailboxes throughout North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Bizanga sells direct to Internet service providers, cable operators, fixed-line and mobile operators. The technology is also available on an OEM basis to application software vendors. Bizanga is a member of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Work Group (http://www.maawg.org). For more information about Bizanga, visit the company's Web site at http://www.bizanga.com.

About Comstar UTS

JSC Comstar-United TeleSystems is the leading fixed-line telecommunications company in Moscow, both in terms of revenues and subscribers. Comstar UTS provides voice, data, Internet, pay-TV and other value-added services to residential and corporate subscribers and operators, using its extensive backbone network and exclusive last mile access to 97% of Moscow households. In addition, the Company offers communications services in five Russian regions and also in Armenia and Ukraine. As at the end of 3Q2008, Comstar has 3.6 million residential subscribers in Moscow and 793K Internet broadband access residential subscribers (BBA), as well as 61K BBA residential subscribers in Russia's regions and the CIS. Group of Companies reported consolidated revenues of US$ 1,2258 million, with OIBDA margin of 41.8% for the 9 months of 2008. Comstar GDRs are listed under the symbol CMST on the London Stock Exchange and Moscow Central Stock Exchange. For more information please visit web-page: http://www.comstar-uts.ru

Some of the information in this press release may contain projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of COMSTAR-UTS. You can identify forward looking statements by terms such as expect, believe, anticipate, estimate, intend, will, could, may or might the negative of such terms or other similar expressions. We wish to caution you that these statements are only predictions and that the actual events or results may differ materially. COMSTAR-UTS does not intend to update these statements to reflect events and circumstances occurring after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. Many factors could cause the actual results to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements, including, among others, general economic conditions, our competitive environment, risks associated with operating in Russia, rapid technological and market change in our industries, as well as many other risks specifically related to COMSTAR-UTS and its operations.

Contacts: Bizanga, Marc Sheldon, +1-650-787-3254, Marc.Sheldon@Bizanga.com . Comstar, Ekaterina Nevskaya, +7-495-956-0000, pr@comstar-uts.ru .

Contacts: Bizanga, Marc Sheldon, +1-650-787-3254, Marc.Sheldon@Bizanga.com . Comstar, Ekaterina Nevskaya, +7-495-956-0000, pr@comstar-uts.ru .