MTS Belarus registered a year-on-year mobile data traffic increase of 43.6% during 2020, driven by a 56.5% rise in smartphone subscribers on its network.
Throughout the year, the operator increased its number of live 4G cell sites by 20%, helping it to attract subscribers swiftly and finish December 2020 with a registered total of 5.7 million customers, according to TeleGeography.
By adopting the LTE-800 band, MTS Belarus was able to begin providing high-speed, wide-area coverage across the Gomel region – including suburban regions, highways and remote villages – that has reach comparable to 3G coverage.
As the next phase of this initiative, MTS plans to use the LTE-800 band to deliver coverage across three more regions – Minsk, Mogilev and Vitebsk. The operator claims that its network is available in more than 98% of Belarus’ territory, covering more than 99.9% of its population.
In terms of 5G, MTS Belarus tested a standalone (SA) network last year and achieved speeds of 1.472Gbps. It also reported a fourfold increase in B2B cloud revenue across 2020.