February 14, 2014. MegaFon subscribers who are currently in Sochi used 100% more traffic over the first few days of the Olympics compared with the average daily use of mobile phones.

According to the company's press service, their subscribers have spoken for about 19m minutes since the Olympics took off in Sochi.

'Our foreign visitors who used our roaming services followed suit and spoke for about 4m minutes,' the message states.

Over the last five days, some 7.5m text messages and 180,000 multimedia messages have been sent, and about 120,000 gigabytes of traffic were downloaded, which is nearly 4 times more than in the high summertime season when hundreds of thousands of tourists arrive in Sochi. All in all, the 4G mobile Internet traffic comes to almost 50% of all MegaFon's traffic at the moment. MegaFon 4G networks were used by some 20,000 subscribers over the first few days of the Olympics. MegaFon also offers its roaming services to 170,000 customers, 40% of whom are visitors to the Olympics from abroad.

'The Sochi games were the first ones where visitors could enjoy high-speed mobile Internet access through the 4G network. Over 40,000 spectators and participants were present at the Olympics opening ceremony, and over 15% of subscribers used MegaFon's 4G services to generate more than 50% of all the Internet traffic within the company network. MegaFon subscribers downloaded and uploaded over 400 gigabytes worth of traffic through the 2G/3G/4G networks. For the 3G, the connection speed was 3-5 Mbit/sec, and for the 4G, the median speed was over 20 Mbit/sec. It was determined that up to 75% of mobile devices that the visitors to the ceremony used were actually smartphones. In most cases, the spectators used their phones to upload photographs of the most breathtaking moments of the show onto Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter,' the operator's press service reports.