Vodafone have currently spent $500 million this year on improving its network after increased customer loss and disaffection. The network has been experiencing large amount of faults, dropped calls, slow data speeds, inconsistent coverage and long holding times for support.
This has been coming for six months with more and more load being placed on the network with data hungry gadgets like the iPhone and iPad. Nigel Dews, Vodafone Hutchison Australia chief executive said “The demand for smartphones probably exceeded everybody’s expectation, but I don’t really see that as an excuse…”
From Vodafone’s media release “Vodafone will replace around 5,800 existing 2G and 3G base station sites with Huawei’s SingleRAN solution, which is capable of delivering 2G, 3G and, later, 4G or Long Term Evolution (LTE) from a single base station site. Vodafone will also install the new Huawei network equipment at more than 2,200 new base station sites that it will bring into its network over the next 18 months.”
“The new network equipment that is being installed is based on the maximum theoretical standards of 42MBps”
