The Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications (Roskomnadzor) has announced on its website last week that it will conduct three tenders for licenses to provide fixed WiMAX services in the 3.4-3.45GHz and 3.5-3.55GHz frequency bands in 30 Russian regions.
The first tender will be held on September 6, the other two on September 9. All tenders will be conducted in the form of ‘beauty contests’ wherein the participating bidder’s applications are evaluated across a number of valuation parameters, including their financial state.
In 2010, the Russian WiMAX market grew to 4 billion rubles, approximately $142 million, reported J’son & Partners. Considering the delays in LTE deployment, WiMAX is still the most advanced pre-4G solution available on the Russian market. The perspectives for this platform are especially favorable in the regions lacking fixed broadband Internet access, note J’son analysts.
Scartel, working under the brand Yota, controls 94% of the WiMAX market.
Maxim Bukin, scientific editor at PCWeek.ru, is less optimistic about the future viability of WiMAX. “Russian WiMax is dying,” he says. “Yota is stopping its regional expansion in favor of its reorientation to the LTE standard. In addition, due to its new commercial policy, the number of Yota’s active subscribers has begun to decrease – from 757,000 to 731,500” in Q1 2011.
Further complicating the durability of WiMAX is the fact that Russia lacks frequencies to deploy mobile WiMAX 2 (IEEE 802.16m) on a significant scale. Bukin believes that Russia’s leading telecom and mobile operators will offer strong resistance to any attempts by WiMAX operators to develop in the regions lacking cable broadband access.
