Bulat to start producing 2G/4G base stations in April

MOSCOW. Feb 14 (Interfax) - Bulat LLC, a subsidiary of Rostelecom that manufactures telecom equipment, plans to begin building GSM and LTE standard (2G/4G) base stations in April, the company's CEO, Alexander Komarov said at the Digital Transformation Forum held as part of Russian Business Week on Monday.

The company previously planned to start production in August.

"We moved up the planned start of small and medium series production of base stations from August to April because by summer or end of spring we already plan to show the first soldered specimens of base stations in Russia and confirm their performance capability," Komarov said.

He recalled that Bulat is carrying out a project to develop the hardware and software system for 2G/4G base stations and signed forward contracts for their delivery with Rostelecom and mobile provider MegaFon .

"As part of the implementation of the forward contract and [the program to eliminate the digital divide being carried out by Rostelecom] we expect that by October we will already be installing Russian software at full speed on existing networks, on base stations and on the hardware platform," Komarov said.

He added that in 2023 Bulat, Tele2 and Rostelecom launched a pilot cluster with 20 base stations where they were tested in real-world conditions. "We see that even in the conditions we were in, not yet commercial ones, by a number of parameters we even managed to look somewhat better than the base stations of the current supplier," Komarov said.