Vodacom intends expanding the size of its network in Gauteng dramatically in the next financial year, with plans to add 555 4G/LTE towers in the province by the end of March 2015.

The expansion, which also includes the deployment of new 2G and 3G sites, forms part of Vodacom’s intention to spend about R9bn on its network in the 2015 financial year, which begins on 1 April. By way of comparison, Vodacom spent about R7bn in South Africa in the 2014 financial year.

According to managing executive Neville van Niekerk, who runs the Gauteng region, Vodacom intends adding another 180 2G sites in the next year, on top of the 281 2G base stations it added in the past 12 months. A further 240 3G sites are planned for the year ahead, on top of the 471 deployed in the past 12 months.

“We plan to roll out 22 LTE sites a day,” Van Niekerk says.

He says Vodacom has big challenges in Gauteng — by far its biggest market in South Africa with about 60% of national traffic — with both expanding coverage and ensuring sufficient network capacity.

The expansion of the 4G network should help take some of the pressure off Vodacom’s 2G and 3G voice networks, Van Niekerk says. “If we can transfer data traffic onto LTE, you are freeing up capacity and spectrum to support better call quality on 2G and 3G.”

In the past year, Vodacom’s Gauteng network carried 30bn minutes of voice traffic and 20 petabytes of data. Data traffic has soared by 77% in the past 12 months, compared to a 13% increase for voice. Ninety percent of the traffic carried across its network is now data.

Although Vodacom, which is still waiting for communications regulator Icasa to license new spectrum bands, has “refarmed” or reallocated 5MHz of its spectrum in the 1,8GHz band — this is far from ideal — Van Niekerk says this allocation is sufficient for now relative to the number of customers using its 4G/LTE network.

“We have refarmed an additional 5MHz around the Vodacom campus in Midrand and in Montana in Pretoria on a pilot basis,” he adds. “We are not going with a big bang approach with this. We’re looking at the impact of this and seeing if we can expand it little by little.”