The Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications (Roskomnadzor) announced the results of the long-awaited tender to allocate four natiowide LTE frequencies, which took place last week.
The results brought no surprises, with the “Big Three” Russian mobile operators MTS, Megafon and Vimpelcom, as well as the national telecom operator Rostelecom, walking away with 7.5 MHz frequencies in the 791-862 MHz and 2.5-2.69 GHz ranges.
Summa Telecom, a telecom operator covering several regions of the country, TransTeleCom, a subsidiary of the national railways company RZD, and Tele2, a subsidiary of the Swedish telecom operator, did not obtain any frequencies.
Under the terms of the tender, the winners have just one year to complete conversion and deployment operations, with commercial launch scheduled for July 1, 2013. Each of the four winners has committed to investing 15 billion rubles, or almost $500 milllion, per year in infrastructure development over the next seven years.
Under current plans, all Russian cities of 50,000 inhabitants or more will be covered by LTE networks by 2019.
These networks will already have been made accessible to 38.5 million inhabitants by the end of 2012, according to telecommunications minister Nikolai Nikiforov.
Source: Roskomnadzor
