Mobile operator Megafon has expanded the coverage the first federal-scale Voice over LTE (VoLTE) cellular network in the Russian Federation.
Over 13 million subscribers now use VoLTE. According to the company's statement, the VoLTE traffic will ‘soon’ surpass 2G/3G voice usage on its network.
VoLTE appeared in Russia in 2016, when MegaFon launched it in Moscow. Then the technology was introduced in several other regions, and such a network received a federal scale after its deployment in the Chuvash Republic, Kursk and Volgograd regions.
VoLTE is now available in 82 of the 83 regions covered by MegaFon’s mobile network – with only Chukotka lacking the technology due to an incompatible satellite backbone connecting that region.
MegaFon said that VoLTE technology works using Enhanced Voice Service codecs, which are responsible for improved communication quality. VoLTE does not affect the cost of services and does not spend Internet traffic: calls through LTE networks are charged as regular voice connections and enter the packet of minutes at a tariff.
Valentin Polozenko, director of the network infrastructure at MegaFon, said: "We see that over the five years of the technology’s existence in Moscow, the voice traffic in VoLTE has already been compared to the traffic consumption in classical types of communication and we are sure that this trend will be repeated at the federal level."
