Vodafone Australia's 3G Upgrade Delayed
It has been reported that the 3G network upgrade being carried out on Vodafone Australia's network has been delayed by its infrastructure supplier, Ericsson. The upgrade was due to be completed by the end of this year, but is now expected to be completed someone in the first half of next year.
Vodafone said that the upgrade was its "number one priority for 2008", when it was originally announced in March 2008. The upgrade includes 3G coverage at 900Mhz.
"The build itself is well on track it's just the integration into the live network which is causing some issues," Vodafone chief technology officer Andy Reeves told the Australian IT newspaper, adding "Our competitors have suffered a number of outages and so we're very conscious that we want to keep our network clean of outages leading up to and through the Christmas period."
Vodafone and Ericsson have been deploying network engineering teams in all states and territories simultaneously. In addition to upgrading all Vodafone 2G sites to 3.5G (HSPA), a significant proportion of high-demand sites in metropolitan areas covered by the Vodafone and Optus joint venture HSPA network sharing agreement are being upgraded to provide higher specification mobile data transmission.
Vodafone's 3G network was launched in November 2005, based on network infrastructure supplied by Nokia.
According to figures from the Mobile World, Vodafone ended the first half of this year with a shade under 4.1 million subscribers, of which 975,000 are using its 3G network.
Rival operator, Telstra recently said that its planned deployment of Enhanced HSPA (eHSPA) to the Next G network is progressing on schedule, as connectivity testing between network infrastructure equipment and cellular device technology was successfully achieved. Telstra expects that it will be the first in the world to experience peak downlink speeds of 21Mbps by the end of the year.
Ericsson is also the supplier for Telstra's upgrade to eHSPA.
On the web: Australian IT - Mobile World
Posted to the site on 10th October 2008
