{"id":47428,"date":"2013-10-10T23:06:11","date_gmt":"2013-10-10T21:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=47428"},"modified":"2013-10-10T23:08:20","modified_gmt":"2013-10-10T21:08:20","slug":"cell-c-subscriber-growth-soars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/mobile\/47428\/cell-c-subscriber-growth-soars\/","title":{"rendered":"Cell C subscriber growth soars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cell C<\/a>\u00a0says it has\u00a0signed up one million gross customers in September, having achieved that milestone for the first time in July.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the MyBroadband 2013 conference in Midrand,\u00a0Cell C CEO,\u00a0Alan Knott-Craig<\/a>\u00a0said that South Africa’s third operator had again signed up in excess of one million customers in September, for the second time ever.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0company\u00a0told BusinessTech that it fell marginally short of reaching that target in August, meaning that its gross sign-ups is close to three million over the past three months.<\/p>\n

“We have grown our base by 33% to 12.3 million customers in just 18 months,” Knott-Craig told delegates at the conference.<\/p>\n

In July 2013, Cell C revealed that it had 11.7 million subscribers on its network \u2013 a steady climb from 8.2 million users in 2011 and 9.4 million in 2012 \u2013 boosting its relative market share to over 17%.<\/p>\n

Knott-Craig has said that the\u00a0company\u00a0is targeting 25% market share in order to be profitable.<\/p>\n

He added that the company\u00a0has doubled the traffic on its network over the last 12 months.\u00a0“When you come to the data traffic, I think its quadrupled,\u201d the CEO has said previously.<\/p>\n

This has put a strain on infrastructure, with\u00a0Cell C\u00a0subscribers voicing their displeasure over the quality of the operator\u2019s network in recent months.<\/p>\n

In an effort to address this issue, Cell C kicked off its network improvement project for the Gauteng region in August.<\/p>\n

Knott-Craig said that\u00a0134 additional sites are being rolled out in order to tackle congestion and improve overall network performance, with 48 sites already completed.<\/p>\n

Cell C plans to have 4,210 sites in South Africa by the end of November 2013, with 1,260 sites serving Gauteng alone.<\/p>\n

The CEO said that capacity on the 3G network has been increased by 30% since January, with capacity to be further increased (target: 47% increase during 2013).<\/p>\n

More on Cell C<\/h3>\n

Cell C admits network \u201ctaking strain\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Cell C network \u201cperfect\u201d by November: CEO<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Cell C dead by 2014: analyst<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Cell C sign-ups boom\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Cell C seeks profitability within 3 years<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Cell C network quality complaints<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cell C says it has signed up one million gross customers in September, having achieved that milestone for the first time in July.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":47475,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[43,42,26],"class_list":["post-47428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mobile","tag-alan-knott-craig","tag-cell-c","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47428"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47477,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47428\/revisions\/47477"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}