Vodacom Group

With the World Cup 2010 coming to a close, Vodacom is already pulling together the lessons learned and using this to plan for future events.

"Our investment plan started more than two years ago and was crucial to making sure that we would be able to deal with the demands put on the network.  Once the fans started arriving, in addition to our normal 24/7 monitoring of the network, a dedicated Network Operations Centre was set up and manned from 08h00 to 01h00 on match days."  said Andries Delport, Executive Director:  Network and Information Technology.

This Network Operations Centre has purely focused on all World Cup related locations such as the stadiums, fan parks, airports, and other key sites.  The quality of service experienced by international subscribers using Vodacom's network was monitored in real-time, and a team of specialists were in attendance on site during all matches.   More than 15,000 man hours were dedicated to operational support during the event.

"We conducted detailed analysis post each match and where needed made adjustments or installed new equipment before the next match took place.  The increase in GSM data traffic, for example, was so dramatic that immediate configuration changes had to be made.  This approach resulted in a high quality and stable network during the complete period.  As proud as I am of Bafana Bafana, I'm even more pleased with the performance of Vodacom's technical and operations teams - they worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make this such a success."

To put the demands on the network into perspective, approximately 600 million SMSs were sent from the start of the tournament until the semi-finals - an increase of more than 40% on normal network traffic.  In some cases, the traffic on a single base station increased by more than 500% compared to just prior to the start of the tournament.

Summing up, Delport said that "We can't relax just yet, but once we wave off the last of the fans we'll be spending quite a bit of time reviewing the information and experience gleaned during the whole event.  We've already learned some valuable lessons, but I'm sure there will be more that we can apply to future occasions."