FOCUS: Russia’s MegaFon teams up with Huawei to launch 5G by ‘18 World Cup

By Yekaterina Yezhova

MOSCOW, Dec 1 (PRIME) -- Russia’s MegaFon, a mobile operator focused on the development of the mobile Internet, has signed a memorandum of cooperation with China’s Huawei, a leading provider of information and communications technologies, to create and deploy the fifth generation (5G) standard in Russia. The novelty, which could be introduced by the 2018 World Cup to be held in Russia, could ease loading of networks, but cover the whole country no sooner than in 2020, analysts said.

“As a standard, 5G will be created by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), and Huawei will be among the first producers of equipment to comply with the new solution. The Chinese company will provide a ‘cloud’ base station in the 5G network and install terminals in testing zones,” Huawei’s spokeswoman Tatyana Fomicheva told Russian Connection.

The 3GPP unites telecommunications standard development organizations, known as Organizational Partners and provides their members with a stable environment to produce the Reports and Specifications that define 3GPP technologies.

MegaFon’s specialists will participate in the creation of the 5G standard and will be able to adapt it to the peculiarities of the Russian telecommunications market, a frequencies range and landscape. The operator will provide its networks to test equipment.

One of the key aims of the memorandum is to enhance collaboration between MegaFon and Huawei on the way to deploy 5G network, including tight technical cooperation. “Thus, MegaFon would like to maintain its technological leadership,” the operator’s spokeswoman Aliya Beketova said.

“Being the leader in mobile data in Russia, MegaFon is interested in further development and modernization of its network. The mobile infrastructure in the country has all the chances to be up to the world standards”.

Beketova said the 2018 tournament, which will be held in 11 Russian cities, has become an additional impetus to start working on the implementation of the new standard in the country. When it comes to mega events, MegaFon is on the frontline. The operator was a general partner of the Sochi Winter Olympics in February.

Investcafe’s analyst Timur Nigmatullin said that despite a possible launch of the 5G network in some regions by 2018, the federal coverage could be approached after 2020–2023.

The partners pointed to certain advantages of the project both for operators and subscribers. “The new standard will allow to effectively use capacities of a frequency spectrum in Russia and enable to engage new bands within 10–100 gigahertz with a total handling capacity of more than 1 gigahertz,” Fomicheva at Huawei said.

“The new standard should tackle the issue of overload of the existing networks following an exponential growth of the Internet traffic after the emergence of high speed and accessible convenient Internet devices,” she said.

The 5G standard will increase the speed of data transfer for subscribers, who will be able to watch videos in the mobile Internet from the very first second without waiting for uploading.

“At the current stage, it’s too early to estimate speed, but it will approach theoretical maximum of over 10 gigabits per second. Such a standard, apart from a maximum speed of traffic, will make possible to watch huge volumes of video content,” Huawei’s spokeswoman said.

Investcafe’s Nigmatullin said, however, that he does not see any necessity to introduce 5G at present in the country, because the market lacks compatible mobile gadgets, and the existing third generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G) networks handle the pressure.

“However, in the nearest several years, we will face need to transfer ‘heavier’ media content, like in the course of development of such services as YouTube, Rutube, Zoomby and others. Simultaneously, we will see a surge in the number of active mobile gadgets that will exert pressure on the frequency band. In this case, the 2G, 3G and 4G networks will need load relief, which will be plausible thanks to 5G,” Nigmatullin said.

He said it would not be correct to measure the coverage of the Russian territory by the 3G and 4G networks in percentage. For example, 4G is used to ease the pressure on 3G in densely-populated regions, mostly big cities.

“Besides, a limitation comes from a necessity to link backbone communications channels to base stations. I think that at the moment the existing coverage by 3G and 4G is close to an optimal level. It’s most likely that operators will accomplish active construction of this infrastructure in the nearest several years,” Investcafe analyst said.

The analyst said that it is complicated to count possible expenditures on the construction of the 5G network, “because we don’t know how much money could be spent on the expansion of the existing infrastructure to install equipment”.

“On the whole, I think expenditures on 5G could be compared to spending on 4G and are about U.S. $5 billion–$8 billion during five–seven years. Audience will be equal to the one of 4G over a long time, though it will depend on major producers of gadgets, when they will start providing support of the latest standard,” Nigmatullin said.

Beketova from MegaFon said that it is too early to speak about financial estimates of the new standard.

End