Ukraine’s telephone company Ukrtelecom will launch a network of free Wi-Fi zones on the streets of five Ukrainian cities, the company’s director Yurii Kurmaz said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

The network is planned to be launched in Kyiv, Dnipro, Lviv, Odesa, and Kharkiv. According to Kurmaz, there will be more than 700 Wi-Fi zones.

When the power goes out, the Internet will continue working for from two to four hours.

This became possible thanks to the modernization of the infrastructure a few years ago when street cabinets were installed in the cities to connect the subscriber line with the network core.

“Discussing various blackout scenarios, we at Ukrtelecom decided to launch a network of free public Wi-Fi zones in five cities where we had modernized our infrastructure a few years ago and installed active street cabinets (a multi-service access node, or MSAN, a device typically installed in a telephone exchange which connects customers’ telephone lines to the core network),” noted Kurmaz.

During blackouts, Kharkiv citizens can also charge their phones and stay connected in the Invincibility Points.