EXCLUSIVE: High-profile Russian service provider Yota – fresh from its huge domestic LTE win last week – expects to launch its first LTE modem next month followed by mobile routers, smartphones and embedded laptops. In an exclusive interview with Mobile World Live, CEO Dennis Sverdlov outlined the rationale behind his company’s planned move from WiMAX to LTE technology: “The only reason is the device ecosystem… the device ecosystem for LTE is going to be much wider than WiMAX… and that is better for our customers.” Sverdlov also noted that the company will continue to adopt an unlimited data offering for its LTE customers, despite its average WiMAX user consuming a huge 13 GBs of data every month: “We do very simple, unlimited tariffs, we never limit the speed, we never limit traffic, so all our customers get as much as they want. The only thing we do is… we can manage the traffic on the level of base station, so we can really prioritise the traffic and based on that we can manage the different services.” View the full video interview here.

Last week it was announced that Russia’s main mobile operators are to team with Yota on a LTE network sharing deal. The network will be built by Yota and will enable MegaFon, MTS, Rostelecom and VimpelCom to provide high-speed mobile broadband services across 180 cities (with a total population of more than 70 million citizens) by 2014, without building separate networks. “The deal will see Yota become the 4G network provider for the Russian telecoms market,” noted a statement. Yota’s deal delivers on its promise last year to adopt a new business model and partner with companies. To that end, Sverdlov remarked in the Mobile World Live video that the company believes “it’s better to open our network for service providers rather than try to make it work by ourselves.”