MegaFon, a leading Russian mobile operator that went public a few months ago, plans to invest no less than 15 billion rubles (approximately $500 million) by the end of next year to deploy LTE networks.
The company’s Sales and Service Director, Sergey Maistrenko, told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti that 4G has already been made accessible in 81 Russian cities, including eight cities of more than one million inhabitants.
Maistrenko believes that, by 2015, at least 15% of the smartphones sold in the country will support LTE.
As of late 2012, MegaFon’s served 64 million active users, including 130,000 4G subscribers. The operator plans to increase its 4G subscriber base to 1 million users by the end of this year.
Russia’s first LTE network was launched in early 2012 in Novosibirsk, Siberia by Scartel under the Yota brand. In October, Yota launched the world’s first LTE Advanced network in Moscow.
