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Mbombela - Vodacom [JSE:VOD] is gearing up for the festive rush, having invested R200m in Mpumalanga to ensure their customers can stay in touch with friends and colleagues during the holiday season.
“Mobile traffic, both voice and data, increases significantly this time of year in key areas across the region," said the company's provincial operations manager, Louisa van Beek.
"We've been ramping up investment to make sure that we can cater for this and are spending almost R200m this year rolling out additional 3G sites and increasing capacity, with a particular focus on township and rural areas.”
She said the company is the only provider with LTE (4G) coverage in all the major towns in the province.
"I'm also really excited that we're on track to achieve our financial year-end goal of having 3G coverage [where ever] we have 2G coverage. This means that all your smart phones and tablets will work wherever there is mobile signal,” she explained.
She said Vodacom’s preparation for the holiday rush doesn't end with investment in new base stations and fibre-optic transmission.
"While everyone else relaxes with their families or visits our tourism hotspots, [our] engineers are going to be hard at work optimising traffic and scanning for potential issues. We have to be even more vigilant at this time of year to make sure that our services run smoothly,” said Van Beek.
She said the number of smart phones and tablets on Vodacom’s network is increasing rapidly, including data use.
Van Beek said each smart phone is using an average of 55% more data than a year ago, while each tablet uses almost 30% more data.
When presenting the company’s interim results, Vodacom chief executive officer Shameel Joosub said the company invested R4.1bn in the network in South Africa over the past six months.
“We added over 1 000 new LTE base stations and 745 new 3G sites. This additional capacity supported the 18% increase in outgoing voice traffic and 75% increase in data traffic,” he said.
He pointed out that the company also completed a six-year project to replace all of their base station radio equipment across the country, meaning that they’re 4G-ready country-wide.
"We just need access to sufficient spectrum to make it operational," said Joosub.
