Russian mobile operator MegaFon has claimed a first by launching VoLTE technology at the federal level, while projecting that VoLTE traffic will ‘soon’ surpass 2G/3G voice usage on its network.
Having initially pilot-launched VoLTE in Moscow in 2016, MegaFon gradually introduced the service in regions including Krasnodar, St Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug and others, and disclosed that VoLTE coverage reached almost all regions of Russia following its recent expansion to the Chuvash Republic, Kursk and Volgograd regions during spring/summer 2021. VoLTE is now available in 82 of the 83 regions covered by MegaFon’s mobile network – with only Chukotka lacking the technology due to an incompatible satellite backbone connecting that region.
VoLTE is currently used by more than 13 million MegaFon subscribers, and is available ‘on most modern smartphones’. Valentin Polozenko, director of network infrastructure at MegaFon, stated: ‘We see that over the five years of the technology’s existence in Moscow, the voice traffic in VoLTE has already been comparable to the traffic consumption in classical types of communication and we are sure that this trend will be repeated at the federal level.’
Source: https://www.commsupdate.com/articles/2021/08/13/megafon-expands-volte-across-federation/