[South Africa] MTN optimises its network

To improve the coverage and quality of its network, MTN announced a R10 billion investment in capital expenditure in March, earmarked for 2015. This massive investment has been allocated for infrastructure upgrades across the country in order to optimise the network and provide better service and connectivity to its customers.

The network upgrades have already commenced at various regions across the country, and entail, among others, the construction of new base stations, and the refarming of existing voice spectrum for deployment of new generation technologies such as the long-term evolution (LTE) network.

Upgrades in KZN, Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Gauteng and Centurion, outside of Pretoria, have been successfully completed this week.

This optimisation exercise is aimed at ensuring the network is of an acceptable standard and is capable of satisfying the needs of the customers.

MTN is currently upgrading its DPI connectivity and this might result in intermittent service disruption when streaming on certain Web sites in the areas where upgrades have not taken place.

It must be noted that in the event of a power failure, MTN base stations are powered by batteries or generators, and part of MTN's investment is to ensure that all base stations are capacitated with the necessary batteries and generators.

MTN wishes to apologise profusely for any inconvenience caused. The upgrades are expected to be completed by the beginning of May.

www.mtn.com.za