VivaCell-MTS to go on with innovations

At the press conference dedicated to the 10th anniversary of VivaCell-MTS, VivaCell-MTS General Manager Ralph Yirikian noted that in the near future the company will go on with the series of innovations in Armenia.

“We will more focus on network modernization. Market trends change. If years ago the subscribers were more interested in voice services, then today they display higher interest to data transfer services because of which the use of voice services gradually decreases,” he said.

Ralph Yirikian recalled that at the very beginning of its work VivaCell-MTS was confronted with the lack of experts.

“At the moment of its establishment the company had hard time in finding relevant experts as the market was not ready for it. We had two options – to invite foreign experts or to trust young Armenian graduates and make relevant investments in their training. We opted for the second and the company started growing from zero owing to the youth,” he recounted.

According to Ralph Yirikian, another main issue they faced was the network construction, which was quite complicated because of Armenia’s geographical location.

Speaking about network distribution in border areas, the General Manager noted that the company aims to provide 100% coverage for them.

Ralph Yirikian said that there cannot be any direct division in terms of network, as the waves of the operators of the neighboring countries often penetrate into the other side of the border.

“Providing coverage on the border has been a strategic goal since the very start and we resolved this issue, and we even penetrated a bit into the territory of neighboring countries. This is important considering that certain areas adjacent to the border are populated by Armenians who also want to take advantage of an Armenian operator’s services. It obviously evoked the discontent of those responsible for the telecommunications sector of the neighboring countries, but we said that we would “retreat” only after they did it,” noted Ralph Yirikian.