"In order for us to have 5G networks in the next few years, we need to be active now"

This year, the import substitution of sophisticated telecom equipment for cellular networks, which Russian officials and businesses have been talking about for so long, began in the country. Thus, MTS started operating base stations of Irtea (the operator is one of its shareholders) on its networks. We are talking about 200 stations, which are being installed in 37 regions of the Russian Federation. Victor Belov, MTS Vice President for Technology, explained in an interview with Izvestia how the domestic equipment is being introduced and technical, administrative and personnel problems related to its use are being solved. In the future, he emphasized, it is on Russian base stations that 5G networks should be built in our country.

- The heads of MTS and Irtea said earlier that this year you will start testing the first 200 base stations manufactured by Irtea on the network. Are your plans still in force?

- Yes, everything is going according to plan. Most of the 200 base stations will be working on the network by the end of this year, all of them will be put on the air in 37 regions of Russia.

During the test operation on the existing network, we will solve two tasks. The first is that we need to understand how this equipment will work in a wide range of climatic conditions and on a wide range of sites. Secondly, we need the widest possible range of MTS engineers to familiarize themselves with the new equipment as soon as possible and learn how to work with it. Any new equipment on the network means the appearance and solution of many technical and organizational issues.

Next year we will raise the bar - we will install 1000 Irtea base stations in places with higher density of subscribers and use new bands.

The realization of such a large-scale project, of course, would not have been possible without the support of the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media and Maksut Shadaev within the framework of the roadmap "Modern and Advanced Mobile Communications Networks".

- To what extent are the purchases of Irtea base stations justified now? After all, today, at least according to the media, there are parallel imports of this equipment from China and Europe.

- We have regulatory license requirements, according to which telecom operators must use Russian-made base stations. Import substitution is one of our goals. We are always looking for ways to make improvements, and we have utilized completely new principles of network construction for this purpose.

Today, Irtea's base stations are built entirely on the Open RAN standard. The Irtea team and I have been working on this concept since 2019, and its implementation is a huge step forward. We have essentially moved the operation of the radio access system from proprietary hardware to servers - a cloud-based IT platform. This is a more universal system where open architecture, modularity and virtualization are becoming the norm. It will give us and the industry independence from foreign suppliers, more flexibility in developing and scaling networks, including 5G networks. Open RAN was conceived as a set of software to improve network efficiency. As a result, this concept was embodied in our fully domestic base stations.

- What other equipment besides base stations do Russian operators need most of all now?

- Apart from base stations, this includes routers, radio relay lines, and server equipment. The list is standard, but in addition to equipment, a noticeable share is software that manages the network. We have been working here for a long time too: we have historically developed a significant part of the software ourselves, and now we are replacing some imported software with Russian software.

- It is not a secret that today operators are faced with the issues of providing small settlements and telephonization of highways. How realistic is it to solve them now using Russian equipment? Are these requirements feasible given the shortage of base stations?

- It's not about the shortage of equipment, but rather about the economics of the issue and the infrastructure needed to connect the sites. A base station installed on a mast will not work without electricity. And it is mainly this problem that we are stymied by. There are quite a lot of sparsely populated places in the country, where getting power supply for a future base station costs as much as, for example, building 100 new base stations.

That is why we cover many federal highways jointly with other operators, using the same masts and base stations. The government at the federal and regional level helps us to cope with infrastructure problems. In a number of places when building new highways, such infrastructure is laid down immediately so that operators can simply install and connect their equipment. We are progressively solving this problem together with the Ministry of Digital Media.

- How feasible and justified is 100% import substitution in electronics? How long will it take for the country to gain technological sovereignty in the production of critical components?

- I think that the current situation with telecom equipment does not require mandatory one hundred percent substitution of all microelectronics. Even today, Russian manufacturers and the IT industry are not in complete isolation. We still have many international component suppliers and partners with whom we can develop joint productions.

But in any case, this task must be solved in the long term, but it must be done step by step. For each segment it is necessary to define a set of certain critical technologies that must be possessed, if not at the level of their production, then at least at the level of patents, developments, topology.

For the emergence of modern domestic technological solutions, telecom operators should cooperate closely with developers and manufacturers. It is very important that new developments get into the real conditions of testing and operation as soon as possible, so that the operators do not put hard barriers and help to bring innovations to the stage of commercial products.

In its turn, the state should provide support and incentives so that companies - both large and small - are engaged in solving various tasks in their area of expertise. In this case, the country will get the very ingredients of technological independence, otherwise it is difficult to cope with such a scale of tasks alone.

- When do you expect 5G to appear in Russia?

- There is an industry roadmap approved by the government, according to which 5G should appear in Russia by 2028. But you have to understand that in order for all the plans to come true, you have to do it seriously in advance. The experience of launching previous generations of networks shows that it takes two or three years of hard work to bring a new standard to the market. Therefore, in order for 5G networks to appear in the coming years, we need to work actively now.

- Why does Russia need 5G at all? It is not a secret that nowhere in the world have invented applications and technologies that could not work without fifth generation networks?

- There are two answers to this question. First - despite the fact that no new applications for 5G are invented, users continue to consume more and more traffic every year. And there is a certain limit to the capacity of the mobile network with the available frequency resource.

The day is not far off when the limit will be reached and simply plugging in new base stations will not help. It will only make things worse, because the excess of base stations creates interference, interference (overlapping of radio signals, which affects the quality of communication). Therefore, the only way to develop is to provide new spectrum in the 5G standard. This is necessary for organic expansion of networks and traffic flow.

The second aspect is that 5G is very different from anything that has come before. The new standard gives completely new opportunities. The fifth generation is extremely important for industrial facilities and industrial control systems, for logistics centers of large companies with a high degree of robotization. Foreign companies in this segment, such as Amazon, have internal communications built on 5G, because no industrial Wi-Fi is capable of ensuring the functioning of tens of thousands of robots in one logistics center.

Or take, for example, a seaport, where all heavy equipment, from container ships to gantry cranes, is remotely controlled. It is impossible to organize reliable wireless communication without 5G networks - such that it would not be scary to remotely manage all this equipment. Economically, such solutions significantly increase the productivity of cargo transshipment.

And there are many such examples. 5G allows faster and more flexible reorganization of entire production facilities and complex processes - where it is more convenient to control a machine or device by radio rather than by wires. Now 5G abroad is primarily used in business, which has a positive impact on the general economic situation.

- The state and business have been arguing for quite a long time about the frequencies on which the Russian 5G standard should operate. In your opinion, what range would be optimal?

- We need all the bands, because historically our country has had very few frequencies allocated for civilian use. Therefore, we believe that the industry needs both 4.8 GHz and 3.5 GHz. They can be used for different tasks: the 4.8 GHz band allows to cover places with a high density of subscribers, and 3.5 GHz is optimal for street coverage.

- You have announced plans to shut down 3G networks in Russia after 2025. Are these plans realistic and how much longer will 2G live?

- We carried out the first serious pilot of complete 3G shutdown in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region in October this year. It was completed much faster than planned. Based on its results, we will accelerate the abandonment of this technology across the country. By the end of 2025, we will switch off about half of 3G base stations in various regions in order to completely abandon this standard by the end of 2027.

And 2G networks will be with us for quite a long time. This is indicated, among other things, by the experience of our foreign colleagues. In Russia, unfortunately, there are still quite a lot of terminals and devices that do not know how to work in the fourth generation networks. This is a problem that must be dealt with.

It makes sense to stop importing into Russia devices that do not support 4G. But I think that for some time yet, maybe 5-7 years, second-generation networks will survive in Russia.