Telecom service provider Vodafone today said its Capex during the first half of current fiscal rose 41 percent to £3.9 billion or $6.2 billion.

H1 Group revenue rose 8.9 percent to £20.8 billion; organic service revenue dipped 2.8 percent to £19.1 billon.

Live video: Vodafone India Q2 result

Vodafone, as part of its Project Spring investment program, added 3,145 3G sites in Q2 against 2,305 in Q1. Vodafone Group 3G coverage in urban areas reached 89 percent.

As per the Project Spring initiative, Vodafone Group is looking at investing £19 billion in two years to extend telecom network and service differentiation in its key markets.

Vodafone Group has added 21,000 4G sites and 38,000 new high capacity backhaul sites since last September.

4G network in Europe covers 59 percent of the population against 32 percent a year ago, and 82 percent of data sessions take place at speeds greater than 3 Mbps.

Vodafone India added approximately 12,400 3G sites. Vodafone India’s 3G coverage reached 89 percent of targeted urban areas.

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Focusing on fixed business, Vodafone deployed high speed next generation network technology to pass a further 1.6 million households in Europe. 26 percent of the targeted 8,000 stores across the Group have been refurbished.

The company invested in IT and digital platforms to improve the customer experience and reduce call centre call volumes.

Vodafone Group said dropped call rates across Europe have reduced 0.19 percentage points year-on-year to 0.71 percent and the average call set up success rate improved from 98.8 percent to 99.7 percent.

As a result of its Capex plans, independent network tests in 20 Vodafone European and AMAP markets show that the telecom operator has the best or equal-best networks for 3G data in 15 markets and for voice in 18 markets.

High Definition (HD) voice technology is live in 15 markets.

4G carrier aggregation network is live in the UK, Spain, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, and will be operational in more European markets by March 2015.

Vodafone Group is trialing Voice over LTE (VoLTE) in several European markets.

KDG Germany has started to deploy its high speed 200 Mbps cable broadband product as an addition to the standard 100 Mbps offer.

Vodafone Data business

The number of Vodafone data customers is 165 million data users across the Group, driving a 77 percent year-on-year growth in data usage in H1 (59 percent in Europe and 110 percent in AMAP).

Vodafone India has 57 million data users with 3G user base touching 14 million.

The number of 4G subscribers of Vodafone Group is 10.5 million.

4G customers across the Group use, on average, 2 to 3 times the amount of data as compared with 3G customers driven by the improved user experience offered by 4G data connections. 4G accounts for 21 percent of data traffic in our European markets against 16 percent a year ago.

Baburajan K
[email protected]