Vodafone UK does not see 4G as a race to have the highest speeds, but it’s about having the strongest network, CEO Jeroen Hoencamp said in an interview on the operator’s blog. “One of the things that makes us different from others is that we have our ‘low band spectrum’. What that means is that our 4G is on a lower frequency, which travels further and deeper indoors.”
“We can offer great indoor coverage, and that’s important because the bulk of mobile activity actually takes place indoors, whether people are at work and at home.” “We could build a network just to achieve massive speeds,” he says, “but the reality is that you don’t currently need anything beyond 20Mbps on a mobile device. Even for streaming video you only need a couple of megabits per second, so we think less about absolute speed and more about using that bandwidth to enable more customers to enjoy great content on the move, even in the busiest places and at the busiest times.”
Hoencamp explains that this is the thinking behind Vodafone UK’s 4G entertainment packs, giving customers a choice of Now TV Entertainment, Sky Sports Mobile TV or Spotify Premium as part of their plan. He goes on to say, “Many customers don’t know what 4G is. Many customers don’t care what 4G is. All customers want is consistency, so that wherever they go they have strong signal, so that they can do what they want wherever they are.”
The CEO added that Vodafone UK now covers half of the population with 4G, insisting that “it’s not about who’s got the most coverage. It’s more about having the strongest signal. We’d love to expand the network faster, but it’s about doing it right first time. I’d rather do it at the pace we’re doing and get it right, than try to go faster and build a thin and flimsy network. You can have a few sites here and there, but that would give you really patchy signal. We only turn 4G on when we have built or updated enough sites. So instead of just having 4G in the centre of a town and saying that the whole town has 4G, we don’t say it’s there until it’s there. It’s about us being able to prove that people are happy with it.”
