Mobile data usage and traffic volume growth in South Africa’s townships is running well ahead of the average growth rate countrywide, Vodacom said on Wednesday. It’s a trend that’s been noted by other operators in recent months, too, with Cell C also reporting recently that it’s seeing huge demand for Internet access from these areas.
Now Vodacom says it has begun testing shipping container base stations designed specifically for township markets. The solution allows base stations to be retrofitted to shipping container shops, facilitating much faster roll-out of network coverage.
The growth in demand for data in townships is a coverage challenge for mobile networks given their high population density and lack of formal infastructure making it difficut to build new base stations, Vodacom says.
The company’s engineers repackaged the base station equipment inside a compact steel structure that is bolted to the roof of existing shipping container shops, says chief technology officer Andries Delport.
“This means that new sites can be rolled out quite literally within weeks as opposed to the typical 12- to 18-month lead time to build new base stations,” he says.
The operator says a standard base station typically has a site footprint of 30sq m and costs about R1,5m. The container base stations have a footprint of 9sq m and cost less than half of a traditional site, says Delport.
Vodacom plans to roll out five sites as an initial test, the first of which is set to go live is in the Alexandra township north-east of Johannesburg. The test sites provide mobile coverage over a radius of up to 1,5km and can service 5 000 subscribers at peak times, the company says.
The idea is that the shops located in the containers will sell airtime, M-Pesa and telephone services.
“With a base station located on their roof, we’ll support the shop with an additional source of income, and they in turn provide us with added site security,” says Delport.
At the end of December 2014, Vodacom had 16,8m active data customers and 9,5m smart devices active on its network. — © 2015 NewsCentral Media