EE says it’ll invest £275 million in its voice call service next year. In total, the company is planning to spend £1.5 billion on its network during the next few years, with over a third supporting its ambition “to reach new standards in phone call quality and reliability”.
5,000 2G sites are due to be upgraded in 2014 and capacity will be increased on 5,500 3G sites.
Olaf Swantee, EE’s CEO, said “While we consistently outperform on the standard UK benchmark for voice call quality and reliability, I don’t believe the benchmark is right. I think the UK mobile industry can do better, and we intend to improve the experience for our customers, taking our quality and reliability to levels to those achieved by other operators across Europe. This year, we have been focusing a large amount of our activity and investment on offering consumers the most reliable, highest quality phone call experience. I’m proud to say that we have reached our highest ever call success rate - 99.2% - while carrying over one billion calls every week. But we can go even further.”
The most recent edition of EE’s Mobile Living Index showed that the volume of calls on the EE network had increased by 25% since the beginning of 2012.
[EE Mobile Living Index Q4 2013 (pdf)]