Cell C losing patience with Vodacom over roaming
Cell C has been negotiating with Vodacom for over a year to arrange for seamless handover between the Cell C and Vodacom networks, said Cell C CEO Alan Knott-Craig.
Cell C has a roaming agreement with Vodacom, and Knott-Craig said he has lost patience with his competitor and service provider.
Knott-Craig previously told MyBroadband that the operator’s network woes are largely due to lack of seamless handover between Cell C’s network and Vodacom.
Vodacom hit back, saying that nothing has changed over the past 12 years in the way they provide national roaming coverage to Cell C.
The roaming agreement, which lets subscribers connect to the Vodacom network when outside Cell C coverage areas, was also brokered while Knott-Craig was CEO of Vodacom.
“I admit that I was on the other side of the fence not too long ago,” Knott-Craig said when asked whether Cell C’s agreement with Vodacom included seamless handover.
He said that at the time, Cell C either didn’t know about or didn’t need seamless handover, but it has become apparent that it does need it now.
Asked about the technical feasibility of seamless handover between two different networks, Knott-Craig said that it is not only possible, but implemented in other countries.
He explained that each cell in a network has a list of neighbours to which it can handover subscribers, and it doesn’t matter whether the neighbour is on the operator’s network or not – the same principles applies to make handover work seamlessly.
“It is a lot easier to do than one might think,” Knott-Craig said. “National roaming is just a form of ‘deep [radio access network] sharing’,” he said.
Knott-Craig explained that (counter-intuitively) as they roll out hundreds of new sites it actually creates more gaps in the network, even though their coverage footprint increases.
This is because cells are packed more densely and have smaller individual coverage areas, which in turn means that subscribers are handed off from cell to cell more frequently.
Cell C’s challenge will be to “block up the holes”, which Knott-Craig said they will achieve by using their recently obtained R5.7-billion in capital. While they are doing so, Cell C’s needs to seamlessly roam onto Vodacom’s network.
Knott-Craig said “I don’t care whether it’s [through] ICASA, or the competition board, or a judge”, but Cell C has to get seamless handover working with Vodacom.
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