Monday, 10 March 2008

Vodafone Selects Ericsson for National Mobile Broadband Rollout

Vodafone Australia has appointed Ericsson as the primary hardware and software vendor to support its national mobile broadband rollout, based on High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) technology.

“Australia is a big country, so we’ve taken a pragmatic approach to our mobile broadband network investment and rollout,” said Russell Hewitt, CEO at Vodafone Australia.

“We’re upgrading our network in a way that enables Vodafone to maintain good cost control and consistently market great value deals to our customers. Vodafone’s national mobile broadband upgrade will change the way many more Australians look at their mobile phones and laptops.”

Vodafone said that its national network upgrade—which is planned for completion by December 2008-- will deliver an enhanced experience to the growing number of business and personal customers using Vodafone Mobile Connect data cards and USB modems.

The upgrade will also improve Vodafone’s capacity to provide high-quality voice calls, SMS, video messaging and Vodafone live! services, such as mobile news, entertainment and the best of the web, to customers in more areas. .

As part of the partnership, Vodafone and Ericsson will deploy network engineering teams in all states and territories simultaneously to ensure more Vodafone customers in regional and rural Australia can enjoy the benefits of HSPA mobile broadband coverage this year. 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 will be upgraded to provide higher specification mobile data transmission.

The national network upgrade will expand Vodafone’s mobile broadband coverage to reach 95 per cent of the areas where Australians live and work.