Mbombela: TECHzMagazine – News Desk
Vodacom Mpumalanga has committed over R600 million in capital expenditure for the current financial year to accelerate 5G deployment, widen network coverage across rural and township communities, and fortify regional telecommunications infrastructure against extreme weather and electrical grid disruptions. The investment builds directly upon the R620 million capital programme deployed across the province during the 2025/26 financial cycle, forming part of the operator’s broader provincial network resilience strategy.
As part of the infrastructure expansion, Vodacom grew its operational mobile footprint from approximately 1,300 base station sites to 1,408 active installations across the province, focusing predominantly on deep-rural corridors and peri-urban settlements. Simultaneously, the operator upgraded its backhaul capabilities, increasing the proportion of provincial base stations connected directly to high-capacity fibre transmission links from 41% to 45%. This expanded fibre backhaul substantially reduces transmission bottlenecks, lowers latency, and ensures sustained data throughput during peak traffic periods.
Provincial network telemetry indicates a rapid transition toward next-generation mobile broadband, driven by broader handset availability and targeted mid-band spectrum deployment. While 4G and LTE retain the baseline volume across Mpumalanga, accounting for 78% of total network traffic, 5G adoption surged to 20% of total throughput, rising sharply from less than 10% in the previous financial year.
To defend network uptime against regional weather hazards, Vodacom introduced its Summer Plan Project. The resilience drive proactively hardens and conditions more than 500 vulnerable base stations across high-risk municipal districts, equipping them with upgraded backup energy systems, industrial-grade lightning and surge arrestors, and automated transmission rerouting mechanisms to mitigate regional power utility instability and seasonal storm disruptions.
Alongside hardware modernisation, the capital programme integrates targeted digital inclusion measures to support local small, medium, and micro enterprises (SMMEs) and low-income consumers through hyper-local tariff platforms like Just4You and Just4YourTown. Monde Ngcukana, Managing Executive for Vodacom Mpumalanga, affirmed that the operator’s capital allocation is engineered to build resilient, future-fit digital infrastructure that supports provincial economic transformation while unlocking equitable participation across the broader digital economy.
