This summer I just want to be on a beautiful beach with friends and whanau around me. But I have this pesky thing called a job which sometimes gets in the way! With Vodafone’s dynamic Smart Network however, I don’t have to choose between work and having a summer to remember.

As hybrid working continues to be a main stay in our lives, it’s important to have connectivity wherever you need to work, whether from a van travelling the South Island or a bach up north. And when it comes to Vodafone’s network, we’ve put the work in so you can extend that summer holiday long beyond the Christmas and New Year break.

• The Vodafone network has over 2100 cell sites which cover 98.5% of Aotearoa’s population.
• In 2022 over 120 new sites were activated across the country and over 150 were upgraded. These included RCG sites, in partnership with Spark and 2 Degrees.
• Of these sites over 50 were in holiday hotspot locations.

We will also be deploying 35 COWs (cellsites on wheels) at summer events and hotspots to increase capacity. For those moments when you lose your mates at a festival, our COWs provide service to help you reunite and continue dancing long into the night.

We don’t just think of our network infrastructure as a static asset however, with a dedicated team taking real time data to flex capacity up and down depending on people’s locations. For example, malls on Boxing Day see a huge increase in foot traffic so we make sure our towers have increased capacity for those shoppers trying to nab a deal. This eb and flow of capacity is a software solution built into our network which couples with engineer intervention to dynamically optimise our service.

This investment, especially of summer hotspots, is not just chosen at random. Instead, we employ an analytical approach to identify traffic hotspots and determine how much capacity to add to a specific location. This involves analysing traffic uplift over the past holiday seasons (some locations go up by 600%) and combining expected organic growth to establish a new level of demand for the next summer break. With this we can design how much more capacity and what technology solutions we need to add to an area, so we continue providing a great customer experience.

We also recently launched Pin Drop which allows us to crowdsource network complaints directly from our customers. This app gives customers the ability to geotag locations they would like us to improve coverage, capacity or add 5G, providing us with anymore data to base our decisions off of.

To check where coverage is available during your summer travels check out www.vodafone.co.nz/network/coverage