Ukrainian telecom group DVL doubles GPON reach and upgrades 3,000 base stations

DVL, the Ukrainian telecom group that brings together Datagroup, Volia and lifecell, has published the results of its second year as a single company. Over that period its operators built or upgraded around 3,000 base stations, and GPON coverage almost doubled, the group said in a statement.

Group revenue rose 16% in 2025 against 2024, and DVL says the trend is holding. Mobile operator lifecell contributed most of that growth. Its revenue climbed 18.7% to UAH 15.9 billion, with a profit of almost UAH 6 billion.

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lifecell paid UAH 3.96 billion in taxes and levies last year, nearly double the UAH 2.03 billion it paid in 2022. Capital investment from 2022 through the first half of 2026 reached UAH 20.1 billion. More than UAH 2.5 billion of that went into the network’s energy resilience.

The group points to infrastructure synergy as the clearest effect of the merger. More than 980 lifecell base stations now run on Datagroup fibre, with up to 10 Gbps of capacity per site. Replacing microwave links with fibre makes the network steadier and leaves room for traffic growth.

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GPON is the other half of that build-out—fibre running straight into the subscriber’s home. Coverage grew from 345,100 to 672,000 households over the past year. The technology delivers up to 1 Gbps and is among the most energy-efficient options in fixed broadband.

lifecell is moving its network core to a cloud-native architecture built on Ericsson’s Packet Core and User Data Management. The company expects the new core to speed up the network and shorten launch times for new services. It is also preparing to retire 3G, which it is already switching off across 17 regions. Voice over LTE is taking over: the technology now covers almost 2.8 million subscribers, 2.4 times more than a year ago, and 40% of voice traffic already runs over 4G.

The operator switched on pilot 5G networks in five cities this year—Lviv, Borodianka, Kharkiv, Kyiv and Odesa, which joined the pilot last.

Energy resilience has been a stated priority since the merger. The network now carries more than 46,000 lithium batteries, and the company has bought thousands of generators. They can keep base stations running for up to 10 hours without mains power.

Laifset, a line of converged plans bundling mobile, fixed internet and TV, went on sale in January 2025, four months after the merger. It now has more than 100,000 users. Next came Inet, a home broadband service with speeds up to 1 Gbps and open to customers of any mobile operator. It sits alongside Laifset 3v1 and lifecell TV under the lifecell VDOMA brand.

The operator has also strengthened its position in mobile number portability. lifecell remains the leader by numbers ported in, and in May 2026 that count passed one million. In July it became the first operator in Ukraine to offer porting through Diia, the country’s government services app.

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Subscribers aged 55 and over, and anyone holding a pensioner’s ID, can take the Turbota plan for UAH 190 a month.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion DVL has spent more than UAH 516 million supporting children, the military, the state and local communities, counted as of the end of the first half of 2026. It pays UAH 1.56 million a month for 156 children who lost parents in the war through its Nashi Dity project, and another UAH 1 million a month towards evacuating the wounded with the Center for Saving Lives charity.

The company also supports the Tytanovi rehabilitation centre for veterans and the Misto Dobra centre in Chernivtsi. A crowdfunding campaign called Pochuy Svoikh, run with the Serhiy Prytula Foundation, raised UAH 14 million for communications equipment for the military. In total, DVL has handed over more than UAH 353 million worth of telecom equipment to Ukraine’s Defence Forces.

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