South Africa’s third-largest mobile operator Cell C has completed its intensive Radio Access Network (RAN) upgrade project in Gauteng and will be introducing similar projects in other metro regions countrywide to drive stability, quality and modernisation of the network.

Cell C reported last month that the RAN upgrade aimed to harmonise all technologies across the network through a complete modernisation of equipment.

As part of the project, outdated network equipment on 1 215 base stations in Gauteng was replaced.

Cell C CEO Jose Dos Santos said in a statement that Cell C’s network teams had been working intensely over the last year to complete the project, which was producing “exceptional results”.

Together with the RAN upgrade project, significant improvements had been made to the management of the network from a site dependency and network redundancy point of view, he noted, adding that these improvements had enhanced the overall stability of the network, effectively eliminating cluster outages as a result of single-point failures.

“We are pleased with the improved quality figures and the feedback from customers has been encouraging. They have noted great improvement in the quality of the Gauteng network as a result of the RAN swap and stability projects. We remain focused on improvements and where there are areas that still need attention, we will put all our efforts into fixing those areas,” Dos Santos stressed.

Cell C also aimed to increase capacity and coverage across the country and had used part of its 2014 capital investment of R2.3-billion to roll out new towers to achieve this goal.

Last year, Cell C rolled out 442 towers countrywide, with 256 of those towers in Gauteng.

An additional 158 sites had been designated in Gauteng and these were in the site build process. These sites were expected to come online early this year.

“The modernisation of the network, com- bined with the increased stability and addi-tional sites, creates the required framework for Cell C’s Long-Term Evolution (LTE) strategy. 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 this year, in line with our LTE strategy,” explained Dos Santos.

Cell C would also continue to upgrade and increase capacity of its third generation sites to improve customers’ data experience, as well as continue to drive improvements to all customer touch points.