Mobile operator Vodafone claims it is confident of avoiding the iPhone network and supply issues that have dogged rival O2, as the firm begins to push the device towards enterprise users.
Speaking to CBR at an event in London this morning to mark Vodafone’s arrival as an iPhone seller, enterprise director Peter Kelly said that the firm had liaised with both Apple and other partners prior to the launch to ensure the supply chain was prepared.
We had 50,000 pre-orders ready and shipped them on the first day of sales and all were activated within 24 hours, he said. The launch was a long time coming so a lot of planning went into it – we spoke to Apple about where we expected demand to be greatest. There have been no issues so far but we’ll monitor the sales forecast closely.
The impressive first day sales – by way of contrast Google’s Nexus One phone shipped 20,000 during its first week on sale – were boosted by people that had delayed upgrading until the iPhone was available. While Kelly said that Vodafone, Won’t sell that many every day, the firm is confident of hitting sales targets for the iPhone.
While O2, who were for a long time the only UK iPhone provider, has regularly seen its network fail due to the huge amount of data used by bandwidth-hogging iPhone users Kelly is confident that Vodafone has the infrastructure in place to cope with the additional traffic.
If people are going to deploy smart devices, and specifically the iPhone, it’s really important that you have a network you can trust, a network that is reliable. We continue to rollout and strengthen our network – more than one thousand new sites were rolled out in the UK last year, and we continue to invest tens and hundreds of millions of pounds in our network this year, he said.
To help customers further improve their mobile signal, Vodafone has also announced it is rebranding its femtocell offering. Now called Sure Signal, it is said to deliver much better indoor 3G coverage and signal. It has also revamped the pricing model in an attempt to attract more small business and consumer customers.
Kelly also rejected the idea that the iPhone is not yet ready for wide-spread business use, primarily due to concerns over battery life and the fact that iPhones can only run one application at a time.
I think you need to look at the user profile of what an enterprise user does compared to a consumer, he told CBR. Consumers are very bandwidth-hungry, they do lots of downloading of YouTube content for example. While enterprise customers use more mission-critical information, a lot of it isn’t necessarily massive in bandwidth requirements. Consumers can be using two or three times the monthly bandwidth of an enterprise user. We’re confident that our network is capable of handling the data.
Kelly said that Vodafone has also been working on its support for businesses looking to make the switch to the iPhone. We’ve been deploying smartphones in enterprises for years. We have over 1,000 business advisers who have been trained on the iPhone and for larger deployments we offer professional support services, he told CBR.
