February 11, 2014. The solemn opening ceremony of the Sochi 2014 Olympics proved that this year's Games are going to become the most mobile ones in history. Of all the visitors to the event, 15% used their 4G networks to share their emotions with the whole world. These were precisely these mobile phone users who generated half of all the traffic within MegaFon network, says the telecommunications provider's press service.

The Winter Olympics in Sochi were the first-ever games to offer visitors high-speed mobile Internet connection within the 4G network. The ceremony was attended by over 40,000 guests and participants, and more than 15% of MegaFon's subscribers used the 4G option to generate more than 50% of the telecommunications provider's traffic. All in all, MegaFon customers transferred and downloaded over 400 gigabytes in the 2G/3G/4G networks. The transfer speed came to 3-5 Mbit/second for the 3G and to over 20 Mbit/second for the 4G network. It was determined that up to 75% of mobile devices that the visitors to the opening ceremony used were smartphones. The spectators mostly uploaded photographs of the most breathtaking moments of the show onto Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

'The Olympic Games opening ceremony was a major reliability test for the infrastructure that took us six years to build. Both our technical indicators and the ceremony attendants' feedback both prove that we managed to ensure great network quality as well as high data transfer speed. The high speed of the 4G network that became available to the Olympic Games visitors opens new horizons for our customers as well. Never before have we been able to see this many photographs and videoclips that were uploaded on the Internet right from the Olympics stadium,' says MegaFon's Deputy Director for Strategic Projects Tigran Pogosyan.