Vodafone doles out the Project Spring goodies

I’ve always thought the deliberately measured tones of vendors’ big win announcements were slightly amusing. In most circumstances we jorunalists are fighting the hype when it comes to corporate messaging, but with big wins there is usually much dignified restraint on show.

But you just know that under the cool language (and reading between the lines) there are possibly dozens of people in sales, marketing, product development, customer support and so on, whooping, fist punching and backslapping after months of hard work, weeks of sleepless nights (for some of them) and general fear and trepidation.

And so it is with Vodafone’s Project Spring. Announced last year at the close of the interminable “will they, won’t they” run-up to Vodafone being bought out of the joint venture for US$130 billion, Project Spring is Vodafone’s big spend on its European and African infrastructure.

Ericsson is up for a big chunk of the £7 billion network improvement programme. It is to provide base station equipment including its Antenna Integrated Radio (AIR) cell site solutions and managed services to assist the programme.

Nokia Solutions and Networks is to modernise and expand its existing radio network and will supply its Single RAN advanced platform, operations support systems and related services. It will also provide a common Subscriber Data Management (SDM) solution.

Huawei is also to supply its SingleRAN solutions and beam-forming Active Antenna System kit to the project.

As usual, financial terms weren’t disclosed but Vodafone has outlined that it intends to spend £3 billion on its mobile networks and £1 billion on its fixed networks in Europe; and it aims to invest £1.5 billion to extend 3G coverage in its Africa, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. A further £1 billion is to go on improving the sacred “customer experience”.