Beeline Russia

Company Overview

PJSC VimpelCom, trading as Beeline (Билайн), is the third largest mobile carrier operating in the Russian Federation. The brand was launched in 1993, shortly following VimpelCom's foundation in 1992, and initially provided a 1G AMPS cellular network.

Today PJSC VimpelCom (Beeline) is a member of the VEON Ltd. group of companies. VEON Ltd. is a global provider of communications, with the desire to be the first in personal Internet services for more than 235 million customers that the company serves at the moment, and for many others in the coming years. Headquarters of VEON Ltd. is in Holland, in Amsterdam. Shares of VEON Ltd. are listed on the NASDAQ and Euronext Amsterdam exchanges.

2G GSM services are provided over the 900 and 1800 MHz bands. In September 2008 Beeline launched 3G UMTS services over the B1 (2100 MHz), upgrading to HSPA+ in 2012, and DC-HSPA+ in 2013. The company introduced B8 (900 MHz) in January 2012.

4G LTE was commercially launched in Moscow in May 2013 over the B7 (2600 MHz) FDD band, and progressively extended outwards over the following years. In August 2014 Beeline announched LTE-A 2C carrier aggregation of B7 (2600 MHz) with a new B20 (800 MHz) service to provide peak data rates of up to 110 Mbps. The company secured additional licences to extend its B3 (1800 MHz) LTE network in October 2015 following a national spectrum auction.

To provide national coverage Beeline holds spectrum sharing arrangements with competitors MTS and Tele2, with agreements in place to extend services in 31 and 27 regions respectively. Beeline also holds a network sharing arrangement with MegaFon covering over 1,300 LTE 1800 base stations in at least 10 regions.

In January 2017 the company announced testing of LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U) and LTE-Advanced Pro (4.5G) technologies, along with both NB-IoT (Cat-NB1) and eMTC (Cat-M1) IoT network deployments. Beeline announced successful demonstration of LTE Licensed Assisted Access (LTE-LAA) in October 2017, combining 20 MHz of 5 GHz spectrum with 10 MHz of B7 (2600 MHz) to achieve 480 Mbps peak downlink data rates.

IoT Strategy

The company began commercial trials of NB-IoT over the B20 (800 MHz) band in June 2018. Further trials were conducted in partnership with Elster Metronika in October 2018.