The State Commission on Radio Frequencies (SCRF) in August plans to extend the permission to use the frequencies of 700, 800 MHz and 2.5-2.7 GHz for fourth-generation cellular networks (LTE) for another ten years. This was reported by Vedomosti with reference to the materials of the State Committee for Radio Frequencies.
The permit was issued in 2011 and expires on September 8th. Operators will be able to obtain an extension after meeting a number of conditions. In particular, they will have to expand their LTE coverage. By 2028, operators will be obliged to cover 99% of settlements with a population of 500–999 people with such networks.
In addition, from 2023, operators will have to build LTE networks only on domestic equipment included in the unified register of Russian electronic products. The software that is used, for example, by base stations, should be included in the register of domestic software.
By 2030, LTE should also cover 99% of federal public roads, according to the draft decision of the State Committee for Radio Frequencies. Earlier, sources of RBC reported about the plans of the authorities to oblige operators to provide communications for federal highways.
The Ministry of Digital Development is implementing several projects to provide Russians with communication services and is considering various additional options for providing access to modern telecommunication services throughout the country, a representative of the department said in an interview with the publication. The ministry did not comment on the draft decision of the State Committee for Radio Frequencies.
There are just over 5 thousand settlements in Russia with a population of 500-1000 people. According to a publication source in one of the cellular companies, the installation of an LTE base station in a village, where there is a tower and an optical communication line, will cost 3-5 million rubles, if not, up to 7 million rubles. If each small settlement is provided with its own LTE base station, the operators' expenses may amount to 15-35 billion rubles, Vedomosti calculated.
In practice, however, the costs may be somewhat lower. Companies covering such settlements will be able to use the infrastructure of competitors as virtual operators (MVNO), and also not to connect villages, “difficult to access due to the special natural conditions of the location,” the commission says.
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SCRF obliged operators to cover LTE settlements with a population of more than 1,000 people in 2013. Villages and villages, where 100-500 people live, are connected by Rostelecom under a state contract – for the deployment of LTE networks in more than 24 thousand settlements, it was specially allocated frequencies of 2.3-2.4 GHz. Thus, according to the source of the publication, settlements with a population of 500-1000 people dropped out of state projects to eliminate digital inequality and now the authorities are trying to fill this gap.
