National Cable Networks (NCN), a Russian cable MSO serving St. Petersburg, is deploying digital services with video compression and service management platforms from Harmonic Inc.

Under the deal, the operator is using Harmonic's DiviCom MPEG-2 encoders and NMX Digital Service Manager.

NCN, which serves more than 1 million subscribers, is using its new compression capabilities to transport a lineup of channels from a main headend to 50 distributed headends over an existing MMDS wireless backbone.

Scientific-Atlanta wasn't left out of the Russia mix, announcing that Teleinform, one of Moscow's largest privately owned MSOs, will partner with S-A on a major system upgrade.

Teleinform, which serves 400,000 subs (the majority in multiple dwelling units), is powering the upgrade with S-A amps and Prisma II optical platform. Overall, S-A is supplying Teleinform with approximately 1,500 fiber deep nodes.