Network 2015

Our superior network in South Africa enables us to provide a leading overall customer and broadband experience. We have just over 9,400 base station sites, significantly ahead of our main competitor in the country. We were the first operator in South Africa to launch 4G services in October 2012. We have renewed around 77% of our 2G network and about 74% of our 3G network to date.

Vodafone’s five main data centres that host our IT systems, three in Europe, and one each in Africa and India, are linked together to form an internal ‘Cloud’. The servers within these centres use virtualisation technology to enable customer services, such as M2M platforms, to be provisioned and scaled up very quickly and easily. It also provides the flexibility to run services for any market from any centre, within regulatory limits.

In February we successfully bid £803 million in the UK spectrum auction for crucial low frequency (800 MHz) spectrum (a stronger, more reliable signal) as well as more higher-frequency spectrum to boost our existing network. We expect to launch our ultra-fast 4G service later this year. The roll out of our 4G service is all part of around £1.6 million we invest every single day in the UK on our network.

Over the last 12 months the Turkish network has been enhanced with the modernisation of nearly 1,100 legacy 2G sites with the latest single RAN hardware and the implementation of around 1,200 and 2,500 new 2G and 3G sites respectively. We have attained the number one position in independent benchmark tests for data transfer speeds and are now seen as the preferred operator in Turkey measured by benchmark net promoter scores.