The loyalty of our customers and the success of our
business depends ultimately on the strength, quality
and speed of our networks, and the nature of our
supporting technology, particularly given the rapidly
increasing demand for data at reduced unit pricing.
Maintaining our current network leadership and
developing broader excellence in IT performance are
important sources of competitive differentiation, and
are critical to delivering on our strategic ambition of
becoming a leading digital enterprise. To deliver on
truly segmented and personalised experiences for our
customers, big data analysis and the IT systems to
support these are becoming a priority investment. Our
IT systems are evolving, becoming smarter, with
real-time digital capabilities, able to react and adapt
quickly to customer demands and provide a seamless
customer experience.
This year, we invested R11.3 billion in infrastructure across the
Group, representing a capital intensity of 13.9%. These
investments included expanding our network coverage in 2G and
3G across all our markets, and 4G in South Africa, Tanzania and
Lesotho, as well as improving the overall network performance
and customer experience. As a result of these investments we
have maintained a strong lead in terms of net promoter score
(NPS) for network quality and network coverage in all our markets,
other than in Tanzania and Mozambique, both of which have
shown significant improvements in the reporting period as we
invest to differentiate to competitors. At the same time, we have
achieved substantial cost savings through our Technology
Efficiency programme.
Vodacom Vision 2020
Maintaining our network leadership position and driving IT
transformation are critical components of our Vision 2020
strategy. Our technology strategy is clearly defined, and we
remain fully committed to providing the Best Network,
IT Excellence and Best Enterprise Solutions all through
effective and efficient delivery.
Vodacom’s Vision 2020 strategy is aligned with Vodafone’s
strategic objectives and has been localised to address our
market-specific ambitions. Our technology strategy outlines
specific plans and commitments relating to:
Further expanding connectivity and transforming our
network in both mobile (3G, 4G+ and to be 5G ready)
and fixed connectivity (FTTx);
Evolving our core network through the Vodafone Ocean
transformation programme by deploying technologies such
as software defined networks (SDN) and network function
virtualisation (NFV); this further complements our journey
to realise our cloud ambitions and delivers benefits such
as scalability and efficiency;
Rolling out a national IoT network and developing new IoT
applications and solutions;
Enabling the digital organisation and enhancing the
customer experience through investment in big data
and analytics, and IT-based customer engagement and
management tools;
Ensuring customers have a seamless omni-channel
experience, supported by smarter IT systems and real-time
digital capabilities;
Customer experience management, ensuring our
customers experience the best possible quality when
using our services; and
Further improving our cybersecurity measures and
controls, ensuring that our customers stay confidently
and securely connected.
Our performance
In South Africa
We have continued to extend our network coverage, reaching
more customers in remote and previously underserviced areas
with high-speed data coverage. We have extended our 3G
population coverage to 99.2% and our 4G coverage to 75.8%.
Our 2G network covers 99.9% of the population, the widest
network coverage in the country.
To further improve performance of our 3G network we have
enabled more than 85% of our 3G sites with 43.2Mbps dual
carrier technology and selectively re-farmed our 900MHz
spectrum by upgrading key 3G sites to U900, dramatically
improving coverage, data speeds and user experience.
Monthly drive-testing results for data performance on both 3G
and 4G indicate that the Vodacom network is superior in terms
of download and upload speeds (throughput). On voice-related
metrics such as drop call rate (DCR) and call setup success rate
(CSSR), the Vodacom network consistently provided the best
month to month results, against our competitors.
Although network availability overall has improved, we are still
experiencing challenges related to power, transmission
outages and vandalism.
We rolled out 4G+ in certain areas, with peak speeds exceeding
200Mbps. Further rollout of 4G+ has been constrained as a result
of the indefinite delay to the planned spectrum auction by
ICASA. Access to further spectrum is essential for us to optimally
rollout 4G+ and importantly future technologies such as 5G, to
meet the growing market demand for mobile data services.
As a result of the spectrum delays we have been exploring
other means to satisfy demand for mobile broadband access
in South Africa. We concluded an infrastructure-sharing
agreement with Wireless Business Solution (WBS) and signed
a non-exclusive roaming agreement, which will enable Vodacom
customers to roam on their network. This will lead to an
improved customer experience.
Where viable, we have continued to self-build our transmission
network to support the radio and fixed network by connecting
more base stations with fibre and high-speed microwave
transmission. During the year, we increased the percentage of
sites with self-provided high-capacity transmission to 92.1%.
We continue to modernise our core network systems leveraging
virtualisation and convergence technologies to fully integrate
applications that also complement our journey to realise our
cloud ambitions. The adoption of these technologies will
improve our flexibility, optimise network resource utilisation and
improve our time to deliver new products and services.
Over the years, we have extended our Customer Experience
Management (CEM) capabilities through the introduction of
probes and tools to improve network performance, operational
efficiency and customer experience. Our CEM systems are being
used to improve both the voice and data experience of our
customers and play a key role in the planning of our network
and deployment of new services.
We have grown our fibre to the home and business footprint
(FTTx) with over 21 000 end-points passed in selective areas.
Through streamlining our order management, delivery and build
processes we have improved the overall customer experience.
We are exploring potential partnerships in order to improve time
to delivery, cost efficiencies and expand our footprint.
We continued to securely connect our enterprise customers
through both mobile and fixed technologies, such as fibre,
microwave and mobile 3G/4G. This was complemented through
our OneNet Business suite enabling our customers to
experience the benefits of a fully unified communications
service. Our cloud services continue to evolve with the
expansion of offerings such as the rollout of the IBM Cloud Point
of Delivery (POD) which is the first of its kind in the Middle East
and Africa, and also one of the first solutions in the South African
market to provide both a cloud managed services offering for
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), as well as a SAP-certified
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the key strategic growth areas
of the business and we will continue to drive investment in this
area. Vodacom’s existing global IoT capabilities and footprint will
be enhanced with IoT end-to-end application capabilities and
propositions. We have partnered with global technology solution
provider PTC to implement a local version of the ThingWorx® IoT
platform in order to develop new IoT applications and solutions.
We have commenced to overlay a low power wide area network
onto our existing national mobile footprint to support the myriad
of IoT application verticals.
During the year, Vodacom South Africa received an award for
achieving the Best IT Performance within the Vodafone Group.
Extensive work was done to understand the customer
experience and associated systems throughout the year. Overall,
we maintained excellence in system and service availability. As
part of our cloud journey we are augmenting our ability to scale
on-demand services for digital customers without overloading
our back-end systems.
The transformation of our customer relationship management
(CRM) and billing systems are now bearing fruit. Vodacom has
completed the consumer contract and top-up migrations to its
new CRM system. Prepaid functionality was included in the
delivery scope, and a small base of prepaid customers have
already been rolled out and is active on the new system.
Vodacom will take a pragmatic approach to rollout the rest of
the prepaid base onto the new CRM system moving forward.
We continue to focus on ensuring our customers are always in
control by providing a set of world-class self-service tools that a
customer can access 24/7 for free. The MyVodacom app has
undergone a complete re-design, adopting global best standards
in user experience and design. It is now even easier to use and
has received very positive customer feedback. Our app users
have more than doubled in the past year.
As part of our digital transformation we are enhancing our IT
platform architecture through a common service model
leveraging standard Application Programmable Interfaces (APIs).
We believe this, together with agile methodologies, will improve
time to delivery, enable the reuse of capabilities to be more
efficient and ease the integration with third parties.
Our Cyber Intelligence Centre (CIC), which collectively monitors
Vodacom enterprise business clients and our International
operations, has been proactively managing cyber threats to
ensure our network is secure. On a monthly basis, the CIC has
dealt with over 2 400 Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS), blocked
65 000 viruses and mitigated 180 000 threats per hour.
Data coverage – 4G1
Network NPS
Benchmark data performance – 4G2
1. Competitive data based on estimates.
2. Source: Atio (March 2017).
Network NPS
Country
Network quality
(NPS score)
Network coverage
(NPS score)
South Africa
1st
1st
Tanzania
3rd
3rd
DRC
1st
1st
Mozambique
2nd
2nd
Lesotho
1st
1st
In our International operations
We continued with the network expansion in our International
markets, and now have more than 7 000 2G sites and 4 800 3G
sites across these markets.
Tanzania launched commercial 4G services on 278 4G sites in
the past year, becoming the second International Vodacom
market with 4G after Lesotho; all our other International
operations undertook extensive tests on 4G over the year.
We continued our RAN renewal programmes. The DRC’s radio
network has been replaced with 4G-ready equipment, and
Tanzania is now almost complete, while Mozambique and
Lesotho were completed in previous years.
In Tanzania, we focused on expanding and improving our data
network. This is evident in significant improvement in download
speed statistics on Ookla over the period. This is enabling an
improvement in our NPS.
We further expanded our ultra-low cost base stations in the DRC,
South Africa and Lesotho; this concept has also been expanded
into Vodafone as a global best practice. We continue to develop
new models to provide broadband services to rural communities
more efficiently in all of our markets.
To introduce new services we have been re-farming some of our
spectrum; this enabled us to deploy our 4G service in Tanzania.
We are continuing to explore new spectrum acquisition
opportunities to improve the quality and performance of our
existing services, and to introduce new services.
All our International markets have the IT capability to support
our personalised pricing offer ‘Just 4 You’, as well as other
contextual marketing and next buy offers.
Our focus going forward is to evolve contextual marketing
capabilities, with real-time triggers and machine learning and
enhancing online capabilities in all International markets.
In the DRC, Mozambique and Tanzania, we have successfully
migrated the legacy M-Pesa platforms to the new ‘G2’ Vodafone
financial services platforms; we plan to migrate Lesotho during
2017. This will enable improved system stability and enhanced
trust with customers, as well as better flexibility to rollout new
products and services across all markets.
All the Vodacom International markets have achieved Vodafone
Global Network Resilience policy compliance. This policy has
been extended to include the fixed network, as well as IT
services. An IT resilience programme that commenced in 2016
will ensure compliance to the Vodafone IT resilience guidelines.
The compliance date has been set for 2021.
