This afternoon Vodafone Hutchison Australia has announced that their Australia-wide network upgrade is ahead of schedule, with more than half of the 850MHz network roll-out complete.
Vodafone Australia (Credit: iamjon/Flickr)
Following the devastating network outages and problems which struck the telco in late 2010 and early 2011, in February this year Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) announced they’d undertake a network revamp, partnering with Huawei to roll out new 3G equipment as well as adding extra capacity to their network.
The telco announced today that since then, they’ve rolled out more than 775 new sites for their new 850MHz network as well as upgrading a further 810 sites across the country, 330 of which are in high traffic sites.
As well as that, the telco confirmed 49 sites around the nation have had their entire equipment replaced, improving performance in areas impacted by the sites.
“A great deal of work is being put into improving network performance, but what’s most important is what our customers are experiencing. While we still have more to do, we have seen a significant reduction in customer calls about network issues,” Cormac Hodgkinson, Director of Customer Service and Experience at VHA said in a statement today.
“We are also building a number of smart tools into the network which will allow us to be able to look at each individual customers experience, so we can spot any problems, fix them quicker and make sure we are tuning and upgrading the network where our customers most need it.”
According to Vodafone’s research, since the improvement works have begun there’s been an estimated 18% improvement in dropped calls, as well as a 66% increase in data reliability.
However Australians on popular forums site Whirlpool have yet to be convinced that the changes have made much of a difference, with a number of threads including this one still playing host to a number of disgruntled customers. There are a number of positive responses though, with one reporting an increase in speed from 400kbps to 2mbps.
Vodafone says that Canberra and Perth will be the first areas to be completed, with works expected to conclude within the next few months. They’ll be followed by other metropolitan areas before the end of the year, with a further 520 sites expected to be upgraded and another 500 sites added.
