Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao on Thursday shared the company’s Q3 update on Project Spring, its investment program to boost coverage and customer experience.
Vodafone has added 165,000 mobile sites, modernized 102,000 sites, and upgraded 91,000 sites to high capacity backhaul since Project Spring began – completing 92 percent of the mobile build.
Vodafone has achieved mobile build targets in AMAP 3 months ahead of target.
The company’s 4G outdoor population coverage increased to 84 percent from 65 percent in Europe.
PROJECT SPRING UPDATE SINCE BEGINNING
Added 165,000 mobile sites
Modernized 102,000 sites
Upgraded 91,000 sites to high capacity backhaul
“Our Project Spring targets for both data sessions above three megabits per second (the threshold for high-definition quality video) and dropped call rates have already been achieved at 90 percent and 0.5 percent respectively,” said Vittorio Colao.
Vodafone has made investment in the deployment of 4G LTE carrier aggregation across 7,300 sites in Europe to enhance customers’ data experience, and Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is now live in 4 markets.
In AMAP, Project Spring dropped call rate target has been achieved at less than 1.0 percent.
In India, Vodafone added 7,600 3G sites in the third quarter and aims to achieve 95 percent 3G coverage in targeted urban areas by March 2016.
Vodafone India’s 4G services in 5 circles by the end of the year will be covering around 45 percent of its current data revenue.
The telecom operator expanded European fixed network to an additional 1.1 million households in the third quarter, taking the total to 29 million – targeting more homes and businesses in Italy, Spain and Portugal.
Vodafone’s FTTH in Portugal will cover an additional 0.5 million homes, or 2.75 million homes in total by the end of 2016.
As a result of the Project Spring program, total data traffic grew 68 percent in Q3 against 75 percent in Q2. Data growth in Europe was 60 percent (64 percent) and 78 percent (90 percent) in AMAP.
Vodafone has 34.8 million 4G customers across 20 markets by adding 4.7 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2016. 4G now accounts for 45 percent of data traffic on our European network and average usage per smartphone customer grew 46 percent, averaging over 1 gigabyte per month.
The number of active data users across AMPAP markets increased by 18.7 million in Q3 to 128.7 million, said Vodafone Group.
As part of Project Spring investment plan, Vodafone Group has invested in global IP-VPN network and is present in 65 countries with 259 Points of Presence (PoPs). Its M2M services are now available in 29 markets.
