CANBERRA’S Vodafone customers will be happy to hear a major network equipment upgrade program to improve performance and reliability starts on Monday.

Vodafone chief technology officer Michael Young said following the upgrade, customers in Canberra could expect to see greater performance and reliability from the Vodafone network.

“We are also introducing other new technologies and capacity into the network throughout the year bringing better coverage and faster data speeds than before from Vodafone,” he said.

“With the same new equipment we are using in our Canberra upgrade, we recently completed the first roll-out of our network equipment upgrade program in Newcastle, NSW and have seen a marked improvement in network performance indicators at all of the upgraded sites. We expect similar results at all sites in Canberra following the equipment upgrade.”

The new equipment is capable of delivering 2G, 3G and later 4G from a single base station site.

After the upgrade, Vodafone will spend four to six weeks drive-testing and tuning the network.

Customers who may be affected will be sent an SMS alert to voice. The upgrade will not effect emergency calls.

Vodafone also plan to introduce to the Canberra network, six 850MHz network sites by the end of September in addition to the 10 sites that were installed in June.

The 850MHz network is designed to provide improved indoor mobile network coverage and faster data speeds for customers using compatible 850MHz smartphones and mobile broadband devices.