Ericsson has signed its 5G network deal with Russian telecom operator MTS at the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2019) in Barcelona.

MTS will deploy 5G networks within pilot zones and commercial clusters in the first year. The roadmap drafted by Ericsson indicates that MTS will be shifting its LTE networks to LTE Advanced Pro Gigabit LTE networks as part of the 5G strategy.

Alexey Kornya, president and CEO of MTS, said: “We are ready to launch the first 5G pilot zones on the MTS commercial network, combining our achievements and insights with exciting new technologies.”

MTS leadership team includes Andrei Ushatsky as the vice president for Technology and IT. MTS in 2019 announced the appointment of Kirill Dmitriev as vice president of Digital Solutions for Home; and Inessa Galaktionova as vice president, Sales and Customer Service.

MTS 5G roadmap

2019

Deployment of the first pre-commercial 5G NR pilot

Launch of the first 5G Fixed Wireless Access pilot

Deployment of commercial Gigabit LTE solution: based on LTE Advanced Pro standard, networks including Massive MIMO and LAA with peak data rates close to 1 Gb/sec

Launch of Private Networks solution based on LTE, Mission critical PTT, Enterprise LTE Core solution and corresponding services

Development of IoT use cases for industry, agriculture, city infrastructure and utilities.

2020

Deployment of 5G networks for eMBB use cases in Russian regions

LTE evolution – deployments of network technology for super low latency and Short TTI

2021-2022

Deployment of Private Networks for smart manufacturing

Support of virtual reality applications in commercial products

Test zones for autonomous transport

Arun Bansal, head of Europe and Latin America at Ericsson, said: “This year we will deploy commercial Gigabit LTE networks based on LTE Advanced Pro standard, Massive MIMO and LAA with peak data rates close to 1 Gb/sec.”