Telstra’s announcement yesterday of its growth of 1.3 million mobile services gives it 15.1 million mobile subscriptions and 49% market share. This is Telstra’s highest market share this century. Telstra has gained share largely at the expense of Vodafone and its fall from favour due to its much publicised network and service issues.
It will be interesting to see the effect on performance of the extensive network upgrade which Vodafone is undertaking. Their noses must be well and truly to the grindstone in Vodafone network land with actions like:
- Change-out of its radio access equipment with Huawei Single RAN kit
- Introduction of an 850 MHz low band HSPA channel on its 3G network to improve capacity and coverage
- The roll-out of 4G LTE 1800MHz to boost network peak speeds
- Addition of lots of new base stations helped by the May 2012 Optus base station sharing deal
- Inclusion of base stations in their network resulting from the closure of the 3GIS Hutchison/Telstra shared network
- Implementation of roaming onto Optus’ network to boost coverage in remote areas
Vodafone announced this month the turning on of 1,200 new base stations in regional areas across Australia indicating their $1Bn program is getting traction.
Telstra will need to keep its pedal to the metal to keep its network growing to match the growth in the whole mobile data market as well as the growth in its share. Telstra’s CEO recently mentioned ongoing 40% YoY growth in mobile data volumes. This level of growth has been experienced for some years.