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Vodacom 'ready' for 4G as data crunch looms

Cape Town - Vodacom has completed the overhaul of its mobile network, and it is ready to roll out next-generation high speed data services.

The operator announced to media on Thursday that it had invested R1bn in the network just to replace old equipment.

"The base station becomes software configurable that launch any type of technology now you can literally do it remotely, via software configurability. To a large extent, that is how we do LTE," Steven Barnwell managing executive for Vodacom's operations in the Western Cape region told Fin24.

The rejuvenated network is aimed at helping the company meet the demand for data which is growing at exponential rates.

"We're talking about growth numbers of 75%, so you can imagine if you're growing at that pace on data, the demand for spectrum is increasing every day," said Barnwell.

Political will

In late 2013, then Minister of Communications Yunus Carrim indicated that the department would move fast to implement a policy on mobile broadband.

"Obviously, we have to move with speed too on spectrum policy. We aim to finalise the Spectrum Policy by March 2014. This includes the issue of high-demand spectrum for broadband, which is linked to digital migration," he said at the Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference.

However, after the May elections, Carrim was removed and the competence was taken up by new political leadership.

"We expect to have a White Paper on Integrated ICT Policy by the end of this financial year, in March 2015. The Department, working with the regulator, Icasa, will seek to resolve spectrum shortage for network capacity in the short to media term," said Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Services, Dr Siyabonga Cwele.

However, the regulator, Icasa or the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa, has consistently failed to announce a spectrum auction in the key frequency bands needed for high-speed data networks.

Mobile broadband in SA has been hamstrung by a lack of political will to make spectrum in the key 800MHz frequency band available.

Currently much of that spectrum is taken up by analogue television broadcasters who have been unable or unwilling to make concrete plans to begin digital terrestrial broadcasts.

Network crunch

While mobile operators continue to use spectrum more efficiently, a crunch is imminent if spectrum is not assigned.

"At the moment, our LTE deployment is based on refarming of spectrum so we literally try to optimise the network so we go back to the old 2G network and we refarm that spectrum and use it for LTE," said Barnwell.

The company has doubled the capacity of spectrum from 5MHz to 10MHz but Barnwell warned that the demand for data could see a bottle neck.

"At some point we can imagine at these growth rates, you run out of tricks, if I can put it that way, because these are very technical engineering frequency optimisation types of things that we have to do."

Watch Steven Barnwell talk about the quality of the Vodacom network in this YouTube video:


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