Russia launched its first commercial 5G networks in 16 cities on September 11, six years after the plan was first drawn up, the Digital Development Ministry said.

All four operators, MTS, MegaFon, Beeline and T2, are running networks in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, with coverage elsewhere split between them, The Moscow Times reported. On the ministry's breakdown carried by RBK, Novosibirsk and Kazan get MegaFon and MTS, Samara gets Beeline and MegaFon, Veliky Novgorod, Krasnodar, Nizhny Novgorod and Tver get MegaFon alone, Volgograd, Krasnoyarsk, Perm and Chelyabinsk get T2, Ufa gets MTS and Yaroslavl gets Beeline. So in 13 of the 16 cities a subscriber's access depends on which network they are already on.

The launch reaches about 10mn people. The ministry said it plans to extend coverage to 50 more cities by the end of this year, and noted that 4G already covers 90% of Russia's inhabited territory and that domestic mobile traffic has more than tripled in six years. The roll-out was ordered by President Vladimir Putin.

The performance claim is average speeds of 300 to 900 Mbps against LTE, with latency of 1 to 5 milliseconds rather than 30 to 50. "Fifth-generation networks are not only fast mobile internet for megacities but also the foundation for the digital transformation of industry," MegaFon chief executive Khachatur Pombukhchan told RBK.

Operators have been given the 4.63 to 4.99 GHz range, free of charge and in equal shares, because the 3.4 to 3.8 GHz band used for 5G almost everywhere else is held by the defence ministry and the FSB. Putin decided in 2019 that the military would keep it, and the operators have lost every attempt since to prise it loose.

To begin with, though, 5G will run on the LTE frequencies the operators already hold, which the ministry says will add 20% to 25% of network capacity over the coming years. That is a speed improvement layered on existing spectrum rather than the capacity step that dedicated mid-band delivers, and it is what allows coverage to spread quickly to the rest of the million-plus cities.

The State Commission on Radio Frequencies cleared the launch at the end of August, and the terms it set are the clearest statement of the constraint the industry is under: operators may deploy the new standard on their existing LTE frequencies, and on foreign base stations already installed on their networks before September 1. Anything bought after that date has to come from somewhere else. Nokia and Ericsson, which between them supplied most of Russia's mobile network kit, left after the full-scale invasion, and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko said the objective is now for 5G base station coverage to be entirely Russian-made.

The most conspicuous gap is the iPhone. The ministry said Android users would get access "in the near future" while access for iPhone owners "depends on a decision by the Apple corporation". The Moscow Times attributes the block to frequency, reporting that iPhones operate at a lower band than the one Russia has allocated. Experts quoted by RBK give a different reason: Apple keeps 5G activation under control at the firmware level, switching the module on only once it has confirmed an operator's network works properly, and technology analyst Nikolai Turubar said that approval channel was cut when the company withdrew from Russia. Either way, Apple stopped selling in Russia in 2022 but iPhones remain widely used through parallel imports, so a large slice of the country's higher-spending subscribers is excluded on day one.

The launch also sits oddly against what is happening to Russia's existing mobile internet. Authorities have been cutting mobile data regularly to interfere with Ukrainian drone navigation, and the monitoring group Na Svyazi has recorded restrictions being imposed on an average of 63 regions a day. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said the shutdowns are lawful and necessary for security, while conceding that the problems they create for business are "of course, a subject for additional analysis".

The cost of that is already measurable. Russia ranked first in the world for internet disruption in 2025, with 37,166 hours of outages at an estimated cost of $11.9bn, on figures from the research group Top10VPN cited by The Moscow Times. Beeline, MegaFon and T2 have attributed the Moscow outages to external restrictions outside their control.

So the state is selling faster mobile data in the same cities where it switches mobile data off. For the operators, who spent six years arguing for spectrum they did not get, the return on a 5G network is harder to model than usual: the addressable handset base excludes iPhones, the equipment supply chain has to be rebuilt domestically from a September 1 cut-off, and the service can be suspended at short notice by someone else. Meduza, which also carried the announcement, dates the spectrum decision that shaped all of this to 2019.

Russia's Telecom Research Center has meanwhile proposed starting work on 6G now, arguing that early preparation would avoid the problems that held up 5G. The standard does not yet exist.