Vodafone 4G Customer Base Grows To 500,000

Vodafone says it has signed up 500,000 customers to its 4G service since it went live last August, and plans to extend coverage to 208 cities, towns and districts as part of a £900 million investment in its network during 2014.

The British operator says its 4G customers used 300TB of data during December alone, and are using twice as much data as those on 3G plans. Vodafone’s LTE network is now available to 36 percent of the UK population, as coverage has expanded to a further 115 towns and cities in the last few months – many of them close to the major cities announced during the initial roll-out.

Vodafone 4G

Some of the newer locations include parts of Gateshead, Newbury, Rotherham, Slough, Solihull, Sunderland, Stockport, Sutton Coldfield, Walsall and West Bromwich, and coverage is being expanded in Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield as well as 80 towns and districts around London and the South East.

“It’s particularly exciting to see how the nation is embracing 4G in their everyday lives,” says Jeroen Hoencamp, CEO, Vodafone UK. “4G is also proving a big hit with our SME customers such as NearDesk and Fulham FC where high speed downloads, HD video and video conferencing are driving productivity.

“4G is quickly changing the way the UK works. It’s making a huge impact on our Corporate and Public Sector customers who really see the value of 4G connectivity.”

In its most recent results, Vodafone announced it had secured 370,000 4G subscribers, but this failed to stop UK service revenues falling by 5.1 percent, with intense competition, especially in the prepaid and enterprise markets, cited as reason for the slump.

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