Vodafone boss: Slow and steady wins the race
Vodafone CEO Jeroen Hoencamp has given an exclusive interview to… umm, the official Vodafone blog, and has defended the network’s slower 4G speeds.
As Trusted Reviews notes, unlike EE, Vodafone has not built the fastest possible network, or extended as quickly as it possibly can. The reason, argues Hoencamp is that it is not about speed but the quality of the signal:
“It’s not about who’s got the most coverage,” he says. “It’s more about having the strongest signal. We’d love to expand the network faster, but it’s about doing it right first time; I’d rather do it at the pace we’re doing and get it right, than try to go faster and build a thin and flimsy network. You can have a few sites here and there, but that would give you really patchy signal. We only turn 4G on when we have built or updated enough sites.”
“So instead of just having 4G in the centre of a town and saying that the whole town has 4G, we don’t say it’s there until it’s there. It’s about us being able to prove that people are happy with it.”
That last bit was probably a veiled dig at EE, which seemingly every week will send a new press release trumpeting a new area where 4G has been switched on – and will include increasingly tenuous photos to promote it.
So what do you think is better? Speed or consistency? Let us know in the comments.
