Vodacom is ready for LTE

serving 4,300 of these sites through their own microwave and fibre transmission links
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that is pretty impressive actually, which also means they should be able to offer better data rates since Telkom E1 lines are no longer used for backhaul to most sites...

alf101 said:
Ya-nee a lady here at work just learnt that lesson.
A nice R4500 data bill from Vodascum, after playing with her new Samsung Note.
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Which is exactly why I changed my contract to the Top Up option when it came out - no nasty surprises...
 
VC will never roll out cheap LTE (meaning big bundles for less) as they still need to monetize their 3G investments which are raking in big dosh as revealed in their results this week. I think they lost R2bn in revenue due to interconnect price drops, but they easily made that up in increased mobile broadband revenue.

VC will launch LTE at a premium rate to their 3G prices... perhaps 3G prices will drop by 20-30% when LTE's release is imminent, and LTE will be priced at the 3G rates + 20-30%...
 
Next article says Vodacom testing 7.5G but guess what, data prices are still high. They need to make it affordable, upgrade with their spare capacity and boom, win win (somewhat).

I fear it will come back to bite VC in their bum if they don't listen to us consumers :D.
 
LinuxMan said:
first the data prices need to come down, then we talk speed increase
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The two are interdependent - if you make data bundles cheap people will use more data, but slow technology can't handle the load, so the connection will be even worse. Remember wireless is a shared access medium, so whoever access the same radio you do is sharing the bandwidth (unless it is TDM or such like the GSM system).

ngadao08 said:
Either way LTE will be very expensive, airtime will literally run out at the blink of an eye.
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I doubt it, the sooner they can move more people to LTE the more total data they can push and the more spectrum they can potentially refarm from HSDPA/+/3G/EDGE to LTE. LTE (or if they standardised on the newer HSDPA Advanced stuff) makes more efficient use of the same spectrum, so it makes sense if you already have equipment that supports it to shift over.

What really sucks for Vodacom is due to having such a huge subscriber base they have a lot of people using every one of the technologies, so they can't just refarm spectrum like Cell C did for their 900Mhz story.
 
LTE = higher speed = higher battery usage = shorter periods between charges :(
 
There is a lot going on in the LTE space in Africa. I dont think VC is really ready for LTE though. If they were this would mean that all of their radios would have to be software defined, which none of the vendors really have right now....well from what I have seen.
 
4300 self provisioned sites is excellent, Telkom must be in serious pain as a result of the reduced revenue from the links it used to rent out.
 
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