Cell C and Vodacom HSPA+ coverage compared
Whilst Cell C has recently received a lot of attention for the rolling launch of their HSPA+ network in a number of South African cities, Vodacom and MTN launched their HSPA+ offerings before Cell C did.
At their latest city launch Lars Reichelt, CEO of Cell C, said that they had 1900 HSPA+ transmitters on the air across the country. Since then they have added another hundred to that number for a total of 2000 HSPA+ transmitters, according to Reichelt.
During an on-stage interview conducted by MyBroadband founder Rudolph Muller at the 2010 MyBroadband Conference, Pieter Uys, CEO of Vodacom, said that they currently have 1200 towers capable of HSPA+ transmissions.
The biggest challenge with HSPA+ is backhaul capacity, Uys said.
For this reason Vodacom has launched its self-provisioning programme to provide their own backhaul bandwidth to their transmitters.
According to Uys they aim to have 1000 transmitters self-provisioned on fibre cables by April 2011.
Reichelt says that Cell C also gets much better coverage from their transmitters as they use a homogenous 900 MHz network whereas other operators use higher frequency bands as well.
Uys confirmed that the 900MHz band allows for wider coverage per base station and better penetration through walls. Rolling out networks in the 900MHz band works well in more rural areas, but is impractical in urban areas, Uys added.
In the race for HSPA+ coverage it would seem that Cell C currently leads the pack.
Cell C and Vodacom HSPA+ coverage compared << Comments and views
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