News portal BelTA reports the Belarusian Communications and Informatization Minister, Konstantin Shulgan, as saying that his country is ‘ready’ to deploy 5G technology. ‘We’ve been making preparations by arranging test areas where every mobile carrier had a go at 5G technology. We saw how it erases boundaries between the city and the village in service provision,’ he is quoted as saying, noting that national PTO Beltelecom, MTS Belarus and Huawei have ‘arranged a test site’ in Kopyl District, Minsk Oblast. Shulgan went on to say: ‘This technology already allows starting practical work in this direction because the effect of the 5G technology is dozens of times higher than that of the 4G technology’.
TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database writes that in June last year, Belarus’ national infrastructure operator Belarusian Cloud Technologies (beCloud) announced the ramping up of its 5G test zones in the country, as it entered the second stage of widescale testing ahead of the commercial launch of the technology. In a press release at the time, the company noted that since 2020 it has been carrying out trials to explore the possibilities of 5G technology and determine the optimal scenarios for its implementation in Belarus. With the tests organised into frequencies in the 2500MHz-2570MHz/2620MHz-2690MHz and 3400MHz-3800MHz bands, between May and December 2020 beCloud began verification of fifth-generation technologies in Minsk and Gomel.