Russian mobile operator, MTS announced that it has launched LTE Advanced Pro technology, which enables speeds of up to 700 Mbps in Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, Ufa and Yakutsk.
The Operator claims to be the first in the country and in the world to commercially deploy the technology. However, smartphone producers are expected to only upgrade chips in their commercial devices in 2017 so that their devices would support LTE Advanced Pro standard.
High internet speeds under the LTE Advanced Pro standard are achieved by combining frequency aggregation (LTE FDD 1800 MHz + LTE TDD 2600 MHz), multi-dimensional antenna systems (MIMO) 4x4 and modulation 256-QAM. The aggregation of these frequencies became possible after MTS won a spectrum auction in February 2016, to obtain throughout Russia frequency in the 2600 MHz range in the LTE TDD standard, which can be now used to MTS’s competitive advantage.
In July, MTS announced that it has deployed FDD-TDD carrier aggregation technology on its commercial LTE network in Moscow in a move to increase network coverage and capacity in the area. The Operator also signed a collaboration agreement with Nokia early this year to deploy a 5G test network during the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.
Andrey Ushatskiy, Vice President for Technology and IT and Chief Technology Officer of MTS
Today, on the eve of the introduction of devices supporting 4.5G, we are launching the first commercial LTE Advanced Pro network in Russia. Indeed, we are the first telecom operator in the world to launch aggregated FDD and TDD network, which permits us to achieve mobile internet speeds of up to 700 Mb/sec.
