Vodafone Ghana CEO, Kyle Whitehill said the company has over the past two and half years invested GHC50million to improve its fixed voice and broadband network to provide best quality and affordable voice and data services to Ghanaians. He was speaking with senior journalists at a brief meeting prior to a field trip to parts of East Legon where Vodafone cables have either been damages or stolen, and where Vodafone has installed its new Multi Service Access Nodes (MSANs) to provide better quality and high speed fixed voice and broadband services respectively. Whitehill said four years ago, Vodafone inherited a fixed network which ran on old and warn out copper cables serving 250,000 customers, out of which only 5,000 were broadband customers. He noted that the network then was ‘so inefficient’, it provided speeds of up to only 512kilobits per second, and so even the 5,000 customers using it could not do anything apart from light browsing, and some people resorted to expensive satellite-based internet services being offered by other companies at $100 a month. “But two and half years ago we decided for moral reasons among others that we would fix the fixed line network so we invested GHC50million into buying and installing over 150 MSANs across the country to provide our customers with high speeds, better quality and affordable fixed broadband and voice services,” he said. Each MSAN is worth $250,000, and has the capacity to serve at least 1,000 data and voice customer, as opposed to the former system that could hold only 600 customers at a time. Whitehill said currently Vodafone has 265,000 fixed line voice customers and 79,000 fixed broadband customers out of which at least 60% are on MSAN enjoying up to 20megabit/sec speed; but because of the 40% which are still on the old copper network, the average Vodafone fixed broadband speed is between 4 and 5megabits/sec, which is still the most competitive on the market, according to third party reports. “We plan to increase customers on MSAN to about 80% and leave the remaining 20% on the copper cables,” he said. Recently some Vodafone customers have been complaining the company increased individual consumers’ monthly bundle prices from GHC45 to GHC65 and placed a cap of 15GB capacity as opposed to the originally uncapped bundle at GHC45. But Whitehill explained that averagely, an overwhelming 99 percent of Vodafone’s fixed broadband customers consume below 10GB of data a month, and the only 1% of customers consume 99% of data. He said that 1% pay the same price as the remaining 99% but their high consumption harms the data experience of the remaining 99%, so the capping was designed to create a fair balance in the system, and ensure that every customer enjoys a great experience, and those who want more capacity would then have to pay more. “If you are on a domestic package and you are consuming 20GB to 30GB per month then you must have been downloading movies 24/7 and that makes you a business customer and your consumption is affecting eh experience of others paying the same amount as you so we need to migrate you to a package where you pay more.” “We have moved from a network that had only 5,000 customers to now 79,000 in four years and we have improved speeds from 512kb/s to up to 20mb/s and that means we need to manage the system in a way that every customer’s enjoys great experience on our network and that is why we introduced the cap,” he said. He said Vodafone envisages that that 300,000 homes in Ghana would be requiring fixed broadband service going forwards, and a lot of those would be high value customers, who Vodafone is very much interested in so there was need to manage the system in the most efficient manner to separate business consumers from domestic consumers, and ensure every customer enjoys great experience.