Traffic Up and Revenue Down For Vodafone

Hit by falling voice revenues in Europe and slowing growth in India, Vodafone said that its organic revenues fell 3% year-on-year to 21.8 billion pounds (36.4 billion US dollars) in the six months ending September 30. The group's organic data revenue in Europe grew almost 18% year-on-year, compared with about 22% in the six months ending March 31.

Vodafone said that its data traffic in Europe has grown from less than 5 petabytes in the quarter ending December 31, 2007 to around 15 petabytes in the quarter ending September 30, 2009 and is now 2.5 times voice traffic. Still, the Newbury-based operator said utilisation of its European networks was still only at 30% in the quarter ending September 30 and that only 5% of sites are running at utilisation rates of 90% or more during busy times.

Vodafone said the HSPA+ roadmap will meet its needs for the next 2 to 3 years, as upgrading the network to a peak-rate of 21.6 Mbps from 7.2 Mbps will result in a 50% performance boost. It added that it can increase its backhaul capacity fourfold using ethernet microwave technology.

Vodafone also said it now has 83 million customers, 89,000 base stations and one million distributors in India. source: Vodafone presentation