South Africa’s biggest mobile telecoms operator \u2014 Vodacom \u2014 saw a surge in data traffic on its network between April 2022 and September 2022.<\/p>\n
According to the company’s interim results for the first half of its 2023 financial year, Vodacom data traffic increased by 30.3% compared to the same period in 2021.<\/p>\n
Data customers grew by 4.1%, with an additional 934,000 added since September 2021, to reach roughly 23.77 million customers by September 2022.<\/p>\n
In addition, smart devices on Vodacom’s network increased by 11.8% to 27.6 million, while 4G and 5G devices jumped to 20.3 million, an impressive 24.1% gain.<\/p>\n
Vodacom also revealed the average data usage per smart device was 2.8GB per month<\/strong> \u2014 around 24% more than the prior period.<\/p>\n These gains led to prepaid data revenue climbing by 11.8% between July and September 2022, helping bolster overall prepaid revenue during the interim period to R12.7 billion.<\/p>\n “Our prepaid segment delivered a resilient performance given a challenging macro backdrop associated with a sharp increase in the cost of living and disruptions to social grant payments,” Vodacom said.<\/p>\n “Data revenue growth reflects the high adoption of our data-led bundles, which offer lower rates to the most price-sensitive, lower-income consumers.”<\/p>\n The company did not reveal what happened to data usage among its contract customers, but overall revenue in this segment increased by 5.7% to R11.2 billion.<\/p>\n To manage the additional demand for data, Vodacom said it invested R5.8 billion during the period to expand its network capacity. That was 4.6% more than in the same period last year.<\/p>\n The operator said it would leverage its newly acquired frequency spectrum to accelerate its investment in next-generation mobile infrastructure.<\/p>\n The company recently announced<\/strong><\/a> a remarkable record speed on its 5G network.<\/p>\n Using\u00a0 5G carrier aggregation, it hit a download speed of 2.4Gbps on a mobile phone.<\/p>\n MyBroadband went to the Vodacom campus to replicate the result, and achieved around 1.8Gbps on a Samsung Galaxy S22+, while a high-level Vodacom technical staff member recorded a speed of around 2Gbps under our observation using a Galaxy S22 Ultra.<\/p>\n Vodacom has seen a dramatic increase in data traffic on its network in South Africa between April and September 2022.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":458299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,17934],"tags":[35,41],"class_list":["post-468811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cellular","category-smartphones","tag-headline","tag-vodacom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468811"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468821,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468811\/revisions\/468821"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/458299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Big network investment support data growth<\/h2>\n
\nNow read: Vodacom profits drop<\/a><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"