Vodacom bridges digital divide
MBOMBELA - The Vodacom Mpumalanga region invested just over R300 million into the network across the province during the 2019/20 financial year.
This large investment helped to bridge the digital divide, especially in rural and township areas and fasttracked digital inclusion, enabling many rural dwellers to participate in the digital economy for the first time. This, coupled with a concerted effort to drive down the cost to communicate, led to a triple-digit data growth in the province.
Earlier this year, the region announced a range of initiatives to provide greater value to customers and to promote digital inclusion.
These include price reductions of up to 40 per cent across all monthly bundles and by launching ConnectU, a zero-rated platform that provides content aimed at social development and offers a variety of essential services free of charge.
The region also rolled out a number of interventions to assist Mpumalanga government in its efforts to contain the Covid-19 coronavirus.
The lion’s share of the capital expenditure was used to deploy new base station sites, performing upgrades on existing ones and rolling out ultra-fast fibre to accelerate digital inclusion. As a result, 132 sites were activated with 4G technology, providing customers fast Internet connectivity. Currently, over 95 per cent of Vodacom Mpumalanga sites have 4G activated and the 4G population covered has increased from 90,9 per cent in March 2019 to 92,8 per cent at the end of March 2020. 3G coverage increased marginally to 99,8 per cent. The region has now passed 13 243 households of which 40 per cent are already connected on its fast fibre broadband infrastructure.
Zakhele Jiyane, managing executive of Vodacom Mpumalanga region, commented, “We posted a solid increase in customer numbers and added more customers to maintain our leadership position across the province. Importantly, we added 300 000 smartphones on the network to the active base, which means that 93 per cent of our customers are now using 3G and 4G smartphones. Coupled with substantial network upgrades, this has led to data used by active customers increasing by 211MB on average to 1,8GB per user.”
“Critically for us as a purpose-led organisation, we became the first telco in Mpumalanga to roll-out a number of initiatives to help the government and people of the province to deal with Covid-19 pandemic. First of all, we invested more money in the network to ensure that it can handle the additional demand so that people and businesses can work without any interruptions from home. Further, we donated 2 000 smartphones to help front-line health workers to collect and transmit data in real time for resource-planning purposes as government accelerates its Covid-19 testing campaign.”
With many children unable to attend school in person, e-Learning becomes even more important during the pandemic. Vodacom e-School has seen user registrations on the platform increase to over one million to date. Mpumalanga region became one of the three Vodacom ones driving the bulk of e-School new subscriber registrations, posting a 13 per cent increase in new registrations during the lockdown period.