OREANDA-NEWS. December 6, 2007. The promised auction on sale of three licenses for radio frequency resource use, which can be used for UMTS mobile communications services provision will not be held this year, UFC-Capital reports. Vladimir Zverev, chair of the National Communications Regulatory Committee (NCRC), says that the Committee will put up the licenses for auction only in 2008: "The standard cost of the license is UAH 142 million. Besides, this cost will include the expenses of the Defense Ministry related to the frequencies conversion.” According to him, each license provides for 35 Mhz radio frequency use. At the same time the NCRC chair specified that the licenses will be proposed for sale after the Defense Ministry (which currently use these radio frequency resources) estimates the costs related to conversion (i.e. transfer of its users to another radio frequencies). According to the radiofrequency resource conversion plan for 2008, which was approved today at the Cabinet meeting, the Defense Ministry is to submit their estimates to the NCRC by the end of December 2007. Mr Zverev says that the NCRC will approve terms and conditions of the UMTS license auction by July 2008. Taking into account that this auction was to be held in October 2007, the fact that the auction will be postponed for another 6 months will not make happy the potential bidders.

The first operator in Ukraine that obtained a UMTS (3G) license was Ukrtelecom OJSC – the fixed line communications monopolist. However, this license was issued to the company only to increase the value of this operator during its privatization, and therefore, the management was in no haste to roll out this network. The trial run of the operator was constantly postponed and delayed. As a result of it, the Ukrtelecom mobile project under Utel brand was launched only in October 2007.
During all this time, while Ukrtelecom was making a pitch for itself, Telesystems of Ukraine launched into commercial operation its 3G mobile communications services under PEOPLEnet brand. Even despite the fact that this operator uses a rather exotic for Ukraine CDMA 2000 1xEV-DO standard, this did not prevent it from building and launching its own 3G network in the largest regional centers of Ukraine (Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Donetsk and Odessa) just within six months. Intertelecom, the first Odessa-based CDMA operator with the national coverage, also started to roll out its base stations in the same standard.

This was not the end of 3G development in Ukraine, although no other operator possesses a license for required frequencies. Four largest GSM-operators (Kyivstar, MTS, Beeline and Astelit) one after another filed their applications to the NCRC trying to obtain the relevant licenses, but all of them got refusals as the required frequencies are still being used by the military. In order not to lag behind, the operators are constantly upgrading their base stations and other equipment so as by the auction be fully prepared to join a new spiral in the mobile communications development.

At that, they do it in a way that any citizen of Ukraine possessing a UMTS phone may easily find 3G networks almost of all Ukrainian GSM operators. So, presently one can find the following networks:

3G Ua 07 (it looks like MTS, as Beeline was creative in resolving the issue related to 3G standard by setting up a certain JV with Ukrtelecom);
Ua55, which subsequently was renamed into Kyivstar 3G;
Life 3G.

However, unlike the first two operators, Astelit publicly announced that it is going to build a network of new generation. At the same time it said that it will no peddle and will build the HSDPA network. HSDPA is one of the new standards that has already been called as transitional one between 3rd and 4th generation of mobile communications. It is a result of evolutionary development of UMTS networks and ensures data transmission at speeds that are ten times higher than other standards.