Vodafone Ireland has embarked on a €500 million five-year investment programme which is aimed at upgrading its network and ensuring that customers have access to high-quality data services wherever they have voice reception, as well as launching 4G services before the end of this year.
“Vodafone is committed to investing in Ireland”, says Vodafone Ireland head of mobile networks, Sheila Kavanagh. “We have invested €1 billion since 2001 and we’re going to invest another half a billion over the next five years. This is a great story for Ireland in terms of new direct and indirect jobs, as well as the quality of service it will offer business here.”
According to Kavanagh, the Vodafone data network has already been independently rated as the best in the country. “Independent performance analytics firm Metrico has rated us as having the best mobile data service for smartphones and tablets,” she says.
HD voice
“We are committed to making our network even better. This commitment to top performance is part of the Vodafone culture and is a key differentiator for us in the market.”
She points to some of the advantages which the network already offers customers. “We are the only operator in the country to offer HD voice. This is available to customers with most smartphones in areas with 3G coverage, and gives much clearer voice quality and eliminates most of the background noise.
“Our Sure Signal product is aimed at consumers and small businesses who have a poor mobile signal indoors. This can be due to very thick walls or certain types of glass walls.
“If they have a broadband service they can plug in the Sure Signal unit and it will propagate a mobile signal within the house or office. This is an excellent product for businesses with home workers in remote locations. We also have a higher capacity product for larger businesses.”
Data coverage
The Dual Carrier service is particularly beneficial to data users, being four times faster than the standard 3G service. “It bridges the gap between 3G and 4G”, Kavanagh explains.
“At present about 5 per cent of smartphone handsets are dual carrier capable and the service is available to approximately 50 per cent of the population. The network upgrade will extend this to coverage to everywhere we there is voice coverage. You really notice the difference with Dual Carrier when you are uploading or downloading videos or other large files.”
She believes this extension of data coverage is potentially transformational. “This upgrade has been enabled by the additional new spectrum acquired by Vodafone in the auction process last year. This will bring high-speed data to even the remotest areas. This will particularly benefit rural Ireland and its business community, bringing broadband to places that up to now could only make voice calls.
“A lot of the media are talking about 4G being very exciting and so on, but I think the roll-out of data where we have voice is going to be even bigger. About half the smartphones on the market at the moment can avail of the service. They are U900 capable, that’s the piece of the spectrum which delivers the service.
Fourth generation
“The network upgrade is being rolled out at the moment. We have just lit up Waterford and will be moving on to the rest of the southeast region and then the southwest over the next few months. We hope to have the whole country covered in the next 12 to 18 months. This will bring high-speed data to customers throughout the country and bring huge benefits to businesses and mobile workers.”
4G or fourth generation networks have been compared to “fibre in the air” such are the data speeds they offer. “The 4G network will offer upload speeds up to five times faster than fixed-line and 10 times faster than 3G. Download speeds will be twice as fast as 3G.
“If you look at what this means in practical terms it is really impressive. For example, a 50Mb YouTube video file would take three minutes to upload on 3G at the moment. With 4G it will take just 35 seconds.”
While this example may be of interest mainly to the consumer market it illustrates the potential for business. “Mobile workers will be able to access all their files in real time from their smartphones and tablet devices.
Network development
“It will enable new ways of working with more people being able to work from home and away from their offices. We are already utilising our own technology to facilitate our people to work in new and different ways at Vodafone and the results have been very impressive.”
While development of the 4G network has already commenced it will be some time before the service is as ubiquitous as 3G. “It’s not just an upgrade of the existing network. It’s a completely new network and it’s very complex,” says Kavanagh.
“Also, traditional handsets are unable to utilise the service. About 2 per cent of handsets in use at present are 4G capable and it is going to take time to deploy a new generation of handsets. We believe that by March 2014 that number will have risen to 10 per cent and it will increase steadily after that.”
But the lack of handsets is not holding back the network development or the deployment of the new services. “We will be the first operator in Ireland to offer a 4G user trial to a select number of customers in the coming weeks. After that, we plan to have the commercial launch of the service in the autumn.”
To learn more about Vodafone's network upgrade programme, go to vodafone.ie/ network