VimpelCom, one of Russia’s leading mobile operators, announced this week in ComNews.ru, a specialized Russian telecom media resource, that it had 9,000 base stations in its 3G network as of late 2010, with 3,000 of them deployed in Q4 2010.
But the heavy investments required by 3G deployment partly explains VimpelCom’s negative free cash flow in Q4 2010.
Although VimpelCom lags far behind its competitor MTS, which deployed 16,000 base stations in 2010 alone, the company still does not consider deploying its 3G network at a significantly larger scale, at least in the short term.
As explained by the group’s CEO Alexander Izosimov, a dense 3G coverage is likely to attract more subscribers, but the revenues this generates remain uncertain. “To date, no one has indentified a means of monetizing this traffic,” he said to journalists. “We see that 3G networks are underused, and probably MTS sees this too.”
MTS tells a different story. “In 2010, we deployed 3G networks in all Russian regions and provided 65% of the country’s population with mobile broadband access,” said Yulia Dorokhina, the company’s spokesperson. “We will continue to develop the network in 2011 to cover 95% of the population. This means it is incorrect to say that the network is underused.”
Source : ComNews.ru
