As the rest of Europe and North America move to delivering fourth and even fifth-generation mobile services, Ukrainians have been enjoying 3G service for some months now.
Ukraine became the last country in Europe and the Caucasus to introduce the network enabler of faster wireless data.
The nation’s three biggest mobile operators – MTS Ukraine, Kyivstar and Life – successfully bid for 3G licenses on Feb. 23 for a total of Hr 9 billion, with rollouts of the new services starting shortly after.
The mobile phone operator of fixed-line monopoly Ukrtelecom, belonging to Ukraine’s richest billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, had a 3G license since 2005, but failed to actually introduce the service.
The three mobile carriers moved quickly to roll out the services, and by late spring, both Life and Kyivstar were offering 3G in Lviv, and starting to expand their networks out of that testbed city towards central and eastern Ukraine.
MTS was slower, launching its 3G service in Odesa on Sept. 22, although the operator by March 12 was offering some customers outsourced 3G services from Ukrtelecom’s TriMob operator.
While moving at different rates, all of the companies are using a broadly similar strategy to expand their 3G networks. According to Kyivstar’s head of business development, Yevgen Yaytsov, each of the three mobile operators has assembled teams of network-rollout professionals dedicated to managing their company’s 3G launches.
“Our team had been planning the project since September 2014, preparing the tariffs, advertising, and the network (infrastructure),” Yaytsov, who was the deputy head of the Kyivstar 3G team, told the Kyiv Post.
Assembling Kyivstar’s 20-person rollout team was a task in itself. Of the 100 candidates who applied, only 40 were shortlisted for interviews with Yaytsov, and only six were finally recruited. The 14 other team members were drawn internally from Kyivstar’s offices, or came from the operator’s international parent group VimpelCom, co-owned by Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman.
There were plenty of issues to deal with at the start, like an overloaded messaging service, mistiming of news releases, and malfunctioning of the Kyivstar website. That’s why the company started its rollout in Lviv rather than the capital Kyiv, according to Yaytsov.
“It could have been painful. We could have lost subscribers’ trust,” he said.
But Kyivstar doesn’t offer a tariff plan that includes unlimited data, said Yaytsov. He said some users always abuse the offer, downloading “unreal” amount of data, clogging up the network for other users and eating into the provider’s profits.
“There are many examples in the world of unlimited pricing plans causing a business not to hit its expected earnings,” Yytsov said.
According to company data, the average Kyivstar subscriber accesses 33.2 megabytes of data per day. The record is held in the village of Lazurne, Kherson Oblast, where daily consumption averages 101 MB per person.
MTS Ukraine, however, does plan to offer unlimited mobile Internet in their pricing plans.
“For such a young service in Ukraine as 3G, it’s right not to restrict subscribers by introducing high rates, or limit the traffic in our pricing plans. That would force users to check their balance and remaining data,” MTS press secretary Victoriya Pavlovska told the Kyiv Post. “We’re trying to foster a consumption culture.”
There’s a catch, though: MTS will limit data hogs by switching them to 2G speeds once they exceed a certain level of data usage. After 4 GB, unlimited clients will get switched to 2G speed at 150 KB per second.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is also having an impact on the rollout of 3G services. While Kyivstar currently provides 3G services in 350 cities and villages around the country, there are no services available at all in some of the big cities like Zaporizhya, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr and Kharkiv. Kyivstar says that’s because Ukraine’s military is still occupying the frequency bands needed for 3G with their communications networks.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is about 15 years behind the rest of Europe in terms of high-speed wireless data networks. The 3G rollout was stalled for years by government attempts to interfere in the market, for instance by granting a single 3G license to Ukrtelecom in the hope of boosting its value ahead of privatization.
The rollout was also plagued by the fact that the frequencies required for 3G were previously assigned to the Defense Ministry, which didn’t have the funding it needed to upgrade its networks and switch them to other frequencies.
Kyiv Post staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached at [email protected].The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Looksery, and SoftServe.
