MTS has become the first Russian operator to launch LTE-Advanced Pro on its commercial network, which offers speeds of up to 700MBps.
The network is available in Moscow, St Petersburg, Ufa and Yakutsk and uses a combination of FDD 1800MHz and TDD 2600MHz spectrum, which MTS claimed as a world first, 4X4 MIMO and 256QAM.
The first smartphones that will fully support the network are expected to hit the market during 2017, MTS said. Yesterday, Mobile Europe revealed TIM was offering the fastest commercial network in Europe for smartphone owners with a new 500MBps service.
Andrey Ushatskiy, Vice President for Technology and IT and Chief Technology Officer of MTS, said: “MTS is committed to maintaining its leadership in telecoms technology in Russia and is laying the groundwork to evolve its networks to a 5G standard. 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 MBps. In this way we not only provide our customers with a significant increase in their internet speeds, but we also increase the efficiency of MTS’s use of the LTE TDD spectrum in the 2.6 GHz range.”
In October, Qualcomm urged operators to embrace LTE-Advanced Pro on the road towards 5G.