VHA has announced that it will refarm its valuable low band 850 MHz spectrum from its HSPA+ 3G to its LTE 4G network. It says that by the time the initial refarming is completed at the end of 2014 it will provide LTE coverage to 95% of the Australian metropolitan population. Their press release is here.
VHA through its merger with Hutchison has 2X10 MHz of 850 MHz spectrum in metropolitan areas and 1X5Mhz in regional areas. This spectrum has already been refarmed twice. Originally it was spectrum licensed to Telstra and used until 2000 for 1G AMPS. It was purchased at auction in 1998 and used for Hutchison’s Orange brand CDMA network in Sydney and Melbourne from 2000 until August 2006. Following the merger of Vodafone and Hutchison announced in February 2009 the now spare spectrum was added into the 2100 MHz VHA 3G network from late 2010. It has served since then to improve the depth and breadth of coverage of the VHA 3G network.
Now VHA plans to lift their 4G coverage by moving the 850MHz spectrum across to their 1800MHz LTE network. This it can do in the metropolitan areas by initially moving 2X5MHz, half the holding, to LTE leaving the other half to continue along with the high band 2100 MHz to serve their HSPA+ 3G network. Since they only have 2X5MHz in the regional areas they can’t painlessly refarm the 850 spectrum in these areas. According to their recent press release only 1.5 million of their circa 5 million customers on 4G LTE so there is still a lot of load on the 3G network including, until VoLTE is introduced, all the voice calls. This is why their press release focus is on metropolitan coverage.