MTS Belarus targets LTE in regional centres by year end

Mobile operator MTS Belarus has announced that by the end of this year it will have rolled out its 4G LTE network to residents in major regional centres such as Brest, Vitebsk, Grodno, Gomel and Mogilev, with 75% of the urban population to have access to LTE. By early 2017 subscribers in all major cities will be covered. MTS launched its advanced network in December 2015 in partnership with infrastructure provider Belarusian Cloud Technologies (beCloud), which owns a 15-year licence to operate 4G LTE infrastructure in the 1710MHz-1730MHz/1805MHz-1825MHz and 2530MHz-2565MHz/2650MHz-2685MHz bands. Initially only available in Minsk, the cellco’s 4G service promises to deliver peak speeds of up to 112Mbps (downlink) in the first instance, eclipsing the former premium rate of 42.2Mbps offered on its DC-HSPA+ 3.5G system. The operator claims that take-up of 4G in the capital is growing, with more than 25% of its users in Minsk being data users. Since the launch of 4G, it says that the total daily traffic generated by its customers has increased six-fold, to 25.85 million megabytes.