Vodafone to invest €35m in Irish mobile network

Vodafone Ireland has announced that it is going to invest £30m (€35.51) in its Irish mobile network following the sale of its US business.

The investment is part of Vodafone’s global plan to spend £7bn to ramp up services after a record fall in growth.

Chief executive Vittorio Colao said that they were investing in their network as they expected Europe to improve.

“We expect that during the next three to five years, Europe will definitely improve,” he added.

“Therefore, we prefer to have a stronger, more performing and more differentiated operation by then so that we can come out at a higher speed than everybody else.”

In the company’s interim management statement Vodafone Ireland said it retained its position as Ireland’s preferred telecommunications provider with a total customer base of 2.4 million at the quarter ended Sept 30, 2013. The company is the mobile market leader with 2.1m mobile customers.

However, globally organic service revenue, which strips out items such as handset sales, currency and acquisitions, was down a worse than expected 4.9% in the second quarter due to regulator-imposed price cuts and fierce competition in Italy, Spain, Germany, Turkey and Britain. Civil unrest in Egypt also hit demand.

In Ireland growth was driven by demand for data services with the number of customers using smart phones on the network up by 4.3% quarter-on-quarter.

This contributed to almost 70% of all Vodafone Ireland customers now using mobile data on their devices, including phones, tablets and notebooks.

In their Irish statement Vodafone said that they had been updating their network to increase data traffic.

“This growth in data usage has also been driven by Vodafone’s continued investment in its mobile network. Vodafone, in the quarter, completed a network enhancement programme in the south east of the country to make Ireland’s leading network even better.

“Upgrades in the south west commenced in the quarter. This nationwide upgrade programme involves delivering data services everywhere there is currently voice and has already led to a significant increase in data traffic,” the statement said.