Telkom has published its annual results for the year ended 31 March 2019, detailing the progress of its roaming partnership with Vodacom.
The company signed a major roaming agreement with Vodacom last year which would allow its mobile customers to roam on Vodacom’s 2G, 3G, and 4G infrastructure with seamless handover.
This means Telkom customers will not experience dropped calls when moving from the coverage of a Vodacom tower to a Telkom installation, or vice versa.
Telkom said that would conduct a phased transition from MTN to Vodacom leading up to the expiry of its roaming agreement with MTN in June 2019.
“We continued to invest in the wireless network and started implementing the roaming agreement and facilities leasing agreement between Telkom and Vodacom,” the company said in its annual results statement.
80% complete
Telkom said that its roaming agreement with Vodacom has been implemented in phases and is now almost complete.
“We entered into a roaming agreement and facilities leasing agreement with Vodacom, to provide a seamless roaming experience across all their mobile sites,” Telkom said.
“The roaming agreement was implemented in phases starting in the Limpopo region and is 80.0 percent complete.”
Telkom added that the facilities leasing agreement allows it to use Vodacom’s passive equipment to accelerate its network build.
The company increased its capital investment by 30.1% to just over R3 million over the last year, and has increased the number of base stations by 28.7% to 5,116 over the period.
3,438 of Telkom’s base stations are 4G-enabled, an increase of 47.4% compared to the previous year.
“We started refarming a portion of our 2,100 MHz spectrum to LTE, following the successful refarming of the 1,800 MHz spectrum for smartphones,” Telkom said.
“The strategic intent of focusing spectrum resources towards 4G contributed to smartphone subscribers increasing by 91.8 percent to 5.3 million.”
