PRESS: Russia’s choice of 5G resource to hike operators’ costs 84%

MOSCOW, Nov 9 (PRIME) -- Construction of 5G networks will cost Russian operators 84% more because the government chose a less suitable frequency range instead of the world’s “golden” standard of 3.5 GHz, business daily Kommersant reported on Monday, quoting a GSM Association (GSMA) report.

The government is not ready to allocate the “golden” range for 5G since it is exploited by special services and law enforcers, and offered the 4.8–4.99 GHz resource instead.

By 2025, about 43 million subscriptions will be presented by 5G in the country, according to the report. Russia will be close to the global average, but will stay behind the leaders.

The analysts also expect that 5G will bring the Russian economy more than U.S. $5.2 billion by 2025, an equivalent of a 0.3% increase in gross domestic product (GDP)á and the economy will benefit $60 billion from 5G in 2022–2030.

The GSMA recommends the Russian authorities to use licensed joint access if the country finds it impossible to clear the 3.5 GHz band.

The country’s connection operators agree that the 4.8–4.99 GHz range is economically unreasonable. VimpelCom assessed total expenses on unrolling of 5G networks in the next 10 years from several hundreds of billions to 1 trillion rubles, depending on a number of factors.

Rostelecom said that the use of the 4.8–4.99 GHz range will raise costs of creation and ownership of connection infrastructure by 2–2.5 times in comparison to 3.4–3.8 GHz.

(77.1875 rubles – U.S. $1)

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