Telecommunications group Vodacom on Wednesday said it planned to roll out 975 new sites in Gauteng during the 2014/15 financial year – the bulk comprising long-term evolution (LTE) technology.

Vodacom managing executive for Gauteng operations Neville van Niekerk said that 555 new LTE sites would be built in 2014 – a jump on the 140 established last year – with about 200 of the latest-generation, superfast network’s sites to be installed in April alone.

With an ever-increasing jump in data traffic – 77% year-on-year in Gauteng – the group was working to transfer many data users onto the LTE network and ease the constraints on the second-generation (2G) and third-generation (3G) voice services.

As the network became increasingly dense, there was a need to balance capacity and quality, Van Niekerk explained during a media roundtable in Sandton.

Gauteng, which would attract over 40% of Vodacom’s R9-billion capital expenditure for 2014, would get another 180 2G and 240 3G sites by the company’s year-end in March 2015.

Last year, Vodacom added 281 2G, 471 3G and 140 LTE sites to Gauteng’s network, which collectively carried about 30-billion minutes of 2G and 3G voice traffic and over 20 petabytes of data traffic in 2013.

Meanwhile, The Vodacom Foundation would receive an estimated R100-million over the next year for social investment programmes – the majority of which would be used to continue the roll-out of connectivity of schools and provide a shot in the arm for the ambitions of the Department of Basic Education's maths and science-focused institutions nationwide.

The foundation last year spent R80-million on, besides other education-related initiatives, connecting 330 schools, adding to the 560 schools already connected since the inception of the Vodacom mobile education programme in 2009.

Vodacom corporate citizenship division executive head Suraya Hamdulay said the group’s long-term, yet-to-be-defined ambition was to connect every school in South Africa to the Internet.

The programme saw the establishment of nine information and communications technology centres – one in each province – and 31 teacher centres.

In partnership with the department, the foundation in February launched a R6-million national stationery drive which saw the distribution of stationery to 180 000 learners – 60 000 primary school learners and 120 000 high school learners – from 210 of the country's poorest (quintile one and two) primary and high schools nationwide. Over 5 550 of those learners were based in Gauteng.

Further, R5.6-million was spent on assisting 17 000 learners at 13 schools in Alexandra with food security during the July and December school holidays.