MTS Russia

Company Overview

Mobile TeleSystems PJSC (“MTS” - NYSE:MBT; MOEX:MTSS) (Мобильные ТелеСистемы) is the leading telecommunications group in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe. MTS was founded by Moscow City Telephone Network, Deutsсhe Telekom, Siemens AG, and several other shareholders in October 1993. MTS began providing its first GSM based services in mid 1994. While the company is consistently evolving its ownership structure, the majority controlling entity remains as Sistema, a large Russian conglomerate.

The company's branding, including its logo is typically shown as MTS (Mobile TeleSystems) for the latin transliteration of cyrillic MTC (Мобильные ТелеСистемы). Within Russia the company is branded as MTC.

MTS has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since July 2000 and trades under the ticker MBT. The Company’s shares have been listed locally on the Moscow Exchange since November 2003 and trades under the symbol MTSS.

2G GSM services are provided over the 900 and 1800 MHz bands. In 2007 MTS began rolling out 3G UMTS services over the B1 (2100 MHz) and B8 (900 MHz) bands, with a commercial launch achieved in May 2008. 4G LTE services were launched in May 2013 over a 10 MHz channel of the B7 (2600 MHz) band. B3 (1800 MHz) was later introduced in December 2014. In June 2015 MTS annouced the activation of its LTE-A network, providing carrier aggregation up to 3C, of B7, B3, and a new B20 (800 MHz) network.

Simultaneously, MTS began deployment of a FDD-TDD hybrid network, carrier aggregating ordinary B3 with a 20 MHz channel of B38 (2600 MHz) TDD. It's TDD network was expanded further by the activation of LTE-A Pro in December 2016, which added an additional B40 (2300 MHz) TDD service to the mix, and supported DL data rates of up to 700 Mbps.

LTE-U Licence Assisted Access (LAA) testing began in June 2016, aggregating B3 (1800 MHz) with a 20 MHz channel in the unlicensed 5 GHz band, and achieving data rates in excess of 200 Mbps. The service went live in May 2018, achieving gigabit speeds by aggregating 20 MHz of B3 (1800 MHz) with three 20 MHz 5 GHz LTE-U channels.

In February 2019 MTS announced that it would begin refarming 2100 MHz spectrum to deploy B1 (2100 MHz) 4G LTE in small and remote settlements.

MTS IoT

In 2016, MTS and Nokia tested the first in Russia comprehensive IoT solution and NB-IoT radio interface. In December 2017, MTS opened Russia's first permanent IoT lab under GSMA for testing NB-IoT solutions and IoT-services MTS immediately began trialling LTE Cat-NB1 (NB-IoT) over its B3 (1800 MHz) network, with a nationwide launch taking place in September 2018.

MTS 5G

In partnership with Ericsson, and after a year of testing, MTS announced a successful demonstration of its first fully mobile 5G network achieving data rates in excess of 25 Gbps over a network at 14.5 to 15.3 GHz.