T2 Turns MVNO Launches Into a Business Serving 25 Partners
Russian carrier T2 has spent a decade turning virtual operator launches into a standalone business. It now runs 25 partner projects and holds 60% of the market.
Russian carrier T2 now supports 25 full-fledged partner projects and controls 60% of the country's virtual operator market, according to the company. Ten years after it began, the MVNO business that rivals once dismissed as a toy has become a growth source in a stagnating telecom market.
An MVNO rents network infrastructure from a large operator, so banks, retailers and other companies can sell mobile service under their own brand. Customers of bank-branded operators may argue about call quality without realizing they are all connected to the same towers. Comnews Research estimates the Russian virtual network market reached 111 billion rubles in 2025.
From experiment to factory
The project started in 2016 as an experiment run by a team of fewer than ten people. The groundwork came in 2014, when Rostelecom and T2 merged their mobile assets. Rostelecom's own project became the first true MVNO on T2's network, since it needed a mobile offering for its corporate clients. T2's management then wrote the direction into its strategy, funded it and brought in a team with MVNO experience from Yota. It later acquired a company with ready technical solutions.
T-Bank launched in December 2017 as one of the first major external partners. Sber followed in September 2018 with SberMobile. According to T2, these launches created the phenomenon of bank-owned MVNOs, which is unusual even by global standards.
Value, not price
The European playbook of discounting did not fit Russia, where mobile service was already prepaid and among the cheapest in the world. T2 instead pitched MVNOs as added value for a partner's core business: better protection from phone fraud, new ways to talk to customers, and loyalty tools such as cheap service in exchange for card activity.
A full MVNO with its own licence and numbering requires switches, billing and anti-fraud systems, which only large companies can afford. T2 therefore offered lighter schemes in which the partner rents the towers and the technical stack, while T2 handles legal approvals, regulatory compliance and system integration. That opened mobile projects to mid-sized firms. As partner numbers grew, T2 moved from standard schemes to tailored ones, for example connecting banks' own anti-fraud systems. The company says it does not intend to hand this business to competitors.
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