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South Africa
We further extended our voice and high-speed data coverage
2G remains at over 99.9% of population.
3G extended to 99.4% of population.
4G extended to 80.1% of population, the first in Africa to reach
>80% coverage.
Expanded our 4G+ roll-out in key areas, where different
frequencies are combined to provide faster 4G speeds and
increase capacity.
Extended rural coverage by adding 101 rural sites this year to
towns that never had coverage before.
Access to sub 1 GHz 4G spectrum (700/800 MHz) will enable
more cost-effective expansion of 4G to rural areas and will
improve deep indoor 4G coverage.
Further expansion of our 4G+ footprint has also been limited
by spectrum constraints.
We worked on enhancing our network performance and
improving the customer experience
Enabled more than 85% of our 3G sites with dual carrier
technology to improve data speeds and selectively re-farmed
our 900 MHz spectrum for UMTS900 upgrades on key sites to
improve deep indoor coverage and extend our rural 3G
coverage footprint.
Leveraged our national roaming agreement with Rain to
provide an improved data experience for our 4G customers.
We experienced an unfortunate challenge with the
outsourced maintenance of our mobile network, following the
decision by an incumbent supplier to terminate their contract
which has been in place since March 2016. During the final
months of the contract, network performance was negatively
impacted as the previous incumbent exited the relationship.
We have accelerated the onboarding of a new, experienced
supplier since February 2018, and network performance levels
are improving.
Although we achieved good progress in improving our overall
network availability, we continue to experience some
challenges relating to power outages and vandalism.
Our main competitor closed the network performance gap
during the past year, through their sustained accelerated
investment programme over the past few years. We continue
to execute on firm initiatives to ensure that we continue to
provide the best network experience in South Africa despite
the accelerated investment programme of our competitor.
We upgraded and expanded our network infrastructure to
expand our reach and capabilities
Increased the percentage of base stations with self-provided
high-capacity microwave transmission to 91.9%, to handle the
growth in data traffic.
Continued to modernise our core network systems, leveraging
virtualisation technologies for improved flexibility,
performance and reliability.
Implemented a Customer Experience Management system to
enable an end-to-end view of our customer experience on a
single platform. This enables us to detect customer
experience issues, understand root causes, and initiate the
best action to fix the problem.
Significantly grew our fibre to the home and business footprint
(FTTx), with over 54 247 end-points passed; by implementing
an end-to-end digital approach to service delivery and
network planning. This helped to drive significant reductions
in both our FTTx connection costs and time to connect.
Launched the first commercial NarrowBand Internet of Things
(NB-IoT) network in Africa, and made good progress in further
enhancing the capabilities of our Internet of Things (IoT)
platform to support true end-to-end application capabilities
and propositions.
Achieved ~90% of our Enterprise microwave and fibre access
delivery targets.
We made sustained investments in IT to support our digital
telco ambitions
Initiated the separation of legacy back-end IT systems from
new, front-end digital services to create a platform that can
handle high volumes and faster transactions in order to
improve customer experience. This new digital experience
layer will also improve time-to-market for integration between
our network and third-party digital service providers,
benefiting our customers by providing easy access to exciting
new digital services.
Continued investment in Cloud infrastructure and migrating
applications, IT services and network functions onto our Cloud
platforms to enhance flexibility and improve scalability,
availability and performance of services.
Enhanced and further simplified our IT platform architecture
by leveraging standard Application Programmable Interfaces
(APIs) thereby ensuring re-usability and ease of integration
between internal systems and with third parties.
Successfully implemented the first stage of our Big Data
journey with a focus on machine learning as a service and
real-time contextualisation aimed at enhancing our successful
‘Just 4 You’ programme and driving personalisation down to a
segment of one.
Continued the evolution of our customer relationship
management (CRM) and billing systems with improved
functionality, and completed the Consumer contract and
top-up customer migrations to our new CRM system.
Used Robotic Process Automation and AI to automate the
handling of network failure queries via email and instant
messaging through bots.
Made further progress in assessing and implementing data
protection controls and processes to address cyberthreats
associated with newer technologies such as Cloud and IoT,
and to ensure compliance with new privacy and protection laws.
We continued to securely connect our Enterprise customers
Increased network capillarity, with more Enterprise customers
securely connected on-net through both fixed and mobile
technologies such as fibre, microwave and mobile 3G/4G.
This was complemented with the OneNet Business suite
enabling our customers to experience the benefits of a fully
unified communications service (converged mobile and
fixed telephony).
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Our business
Our performance
Our governance
Administration