Vimpelcom Russia and MTS to share mobile spectrum
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Vimpelcom Russia and MTS to share mobile spectrum

Vimpelcom Russia, under the Beeline brand, and Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) have agreed to share LTE mobile spectrum in the country.

The deal, which is an amendment to their existing agreement penned in December 2014, covers 20 Russian regions and is effective of January 1, 2016.

The two companies will share 2,600MHZ LTE frequencies, and the agreement also allows for a doubling of existing peak speeds for customers of both MTS and Vimpelcom Russia, up to 150Mbps.

Mikhail Slobodin, Vimpelcom Russia CEO, said that the first year of partnership with MTS had proven highly effective and promising.

“We are satisfied with the quality of cooperation between our companies and convinced that the share of frequency range and the entire infrastructure will provide the best quality 4G LTE services in larger areas and deliver the best user experience,” Slobodin said.

Andrei Dubovskov, president and CEO at MTS, agreed that the initial results of the joint project had exceeded expectations.

“In the regions where we installed and jointly operated base stations, we have increased the number of LTE subscribers 30% faster than the average pace of growth throughout Russia. We have also managed to reduce the costs of construction and joint network usage by 10-15% compared to our initial estimates,” Dubovskov said.

“With spectrum sharing, we expect to bring mobile broadband to remote areas even faster and anticipate realising more efficiencies. We are grateful to the Ministry of Communication and Mass Media for the timely decision, which should help operators to increase data transfer speeds and speed up construction of the telecommunications network while reducing costs.”

 

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