O2 today unveiled plans to accelerate growth of its mobile network and build extra capacity for mobile data, in a multi-year programme of investment (running to hundreds of millions of pounds).
The planned investment will cover upgrade of the current radio network and also the delivery of new sites. 200 sites will be delivered in London alone in the next 12 months, 40 of which will be live by Christmas 2009. In 2010 other areas of the UK will see similar developments.
Derek McManus, Chief Technology Officer for O2:
“Anticipating growth in demand for mobile services, we have quarter on quarter increased investment in our voice and data networks. Our £500m investment over the last two years has enabled us to offer our customers the best products in the world, including the Apple iPhone and Palm Pre.
“In the past 12 months the mobile industry has seen an unprecedented change in demand. The introduction of world-class devices, in combination with a wide variety of data applications, has brought about a dramatic change in customer behaviour and created an exponential demand on mobile data networks. To put this in context, watching a YouTube video on a smartphone can use the same capacity on the network as sending 500,000 text messages simultaneously.
“We are now aggressively accelerating our network growth programme to ensure we have significant headroom for the future and retain our focus on being number one for customer satisfaction.”
Fairplay on O2 – they’ve taken their share of criticism for issues of network bandwidth/contention with the hugely accelerated data consumption coming from the likes of the iPhone, and are pressing on in addressing the issue.
The data issue is only going to grow in the coming few years, particularly with ‘unlimited’ mobile web add-ons (both for contract and PAYG users) becoming the norm – so this is all good news 🙂