We are ready for high traffic over Christmas: Vodacom
Mobile operator, Vodacom says it has prepared its network for the influx of people to their holiday destinations over December and into January.
Vodacom pointed out that each summer local and international visitors flock to South Africa’s popular holiday destinations, boasting beautiful beaches, green valleys, historic towns, hiking trails, game drives or walking safaris and world class shopping nightlife.
Given that demand on Vodacom’s mobile networks around these hotspots increases dramatically, the operator said it has done a lot of work in the past six months to ensure that its mobile networks are geared up to handle the shift in high volumes of traffic during the festive season.
“We expect mobile traffic, particularly mobile data traffic, to more than double in certain places during this time of the year. We’ve been ramping up investment on the network for the past six months to make sure that we are ready for the high traffic this festive season,” said Vodacom CTO, Andries Delport.
“To this end, we deployed 52 temporary mobile base stations to provide coverage and capacity at key areas along the coast as well some inland destinations.
“Additionally, we completed the deployment of a further 100 permanent base stations in key holiday destinations. We have also upgraded the data capacity on 514 base stations and voice capacity on another 78 sites. On a practical basis, this means that we’ll be bringing faster data services and improved voice quality to tens of thousands of people when and where they need it, Delport said.
For the six months ended 30 September 2016, Vodacom said it invested over R4 billion in its network in South Africa. This allowed the company to substantially widen its 3G and 4G data coverage.
Vodacom said its 2G and 3G network coverage is at 99.9% and 99.2% respectively of the country’s population. The company’s 4G coverage in now at 68.7%, up from 46.8% a year ago and is the widest of the country’s Mobile Network Operators.
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