Vodacom’s R1 billion Western Cape investment

Vodacom Western Cape has spent more than R1 billion to install 88 base station sites in its region over the past financial year, the mobile operator has announced.

The investment includes building 38 new 3G and 4G enabled base station sites, including 16 in townships and six in rural communities, and implementing LTE capacity upgrades to over 75% of base stations in the province.

In addition to the new 3G and 4G base stations, Vodacom Western Cape also built 50 new 5G-enabled sites.

According to Vodacom Western Cape managing executive Carol Hall, the network operator’s 3G and 4G population coverage in the region reached 99.5% and 97.6%, respectively.

Vandalism of Vodacom’s infrastructure in the region is a significant issue, with five to seven base stations suffering malicious damage in a typical week.

This can affect network availability, particularly during load-shedding when backup batteries and generators are needed to minimise service disruption. Criminals often steal these batteries.

Vodacom used part of its R1 billion investment to upgrade 240 base station sites with anti-theft infrastructure and new batteries.

“Through ongoing evaluations on our network performance and capacity upgrade projects, we are able to manage increased loads and network faults faster, achieving more reliable restoration times,” she said.

“As a result, Vodacom Western Cape has the best availability, lowest call drop rate and the lowest congestion levels across all technologies compared to other regions.”

Hall explained that Vodacom would continue expanding its footprint in the province and bring new technologies like Software-Defined Wide-Area Networking (SD-WAN) and fibre connectivity to its customers in the region.

Main Image: The Africa Report