Ericsson wins Vodafone Australia 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, which is being fast-tracked for completion in December 2008.

Vodafone’s national network upgrade 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.

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.

Vodafone is upgrading its 900MHz and 2100MHz mobile network in regional and rural Australia with Ericsson’s latest hardware and software, which is rated to the 14.4Mbps maximum theoretical downlink standard and is amongst some of the highest specification equipment currently available for commercial deployment.

“Our national network upgrade will deliver significant increases in upload and download speeds for urban customers travelling outside the cities,” said Russell Hewitt, CEO at Vodafone Australia.

“Today’s announcement is good news for residential customers looking for an alternative to fixed line internet connections and great news for business people who need mobile broadband access to the internet, email and server-based information in more areas of Australia,” said Hewitt.

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

Vodafone provides quality services to 3.57 mln Australian customers (excluding MVNO customers) and has more than 252 mln proportionate customers worldwide in 25 countries and 39 partner networks including Cyprus with the Cytamobile-Vodafone network.