South African cellular operator Cell C has announced that it has completed its Radio Access Network (RAN) upgrade project in Gauteng. According to a press release, Cell C has replaced outdated network equipment on 1,215 base stations in the province, with plans to install an additional 158 base transceiver stations (BTS) in early 2015, in order to increase capacity and coverage in the area.
Cell C’s CAPEX for 2014 was ZAR2.3 billion (USD201.2 million), much of which was spent on tower deployments; over the last twelve months Cell C installed 442 new towers, 256 of which were deployed in Gauteng. In conjunction with the RAN upgrade project, significant improvements were made in terms of the management of the network, with attention paid to site dependency and network redundancy, thus enhancing the overall stability of the network and eliminating cluster outages as a result of single point failures.
Moreover, the operator said that the modernisation of the network, combined with the increased stability and additional sites, has created the required framework for Cell C’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) strategy. Cell C CEO Jose Dos Santos added: ‘We have also invested significantly in fibre deployment across the country, and connecting fibre to each of our base stations is one of the company’s top priorities in 2015, in line with our LTE strategy.’