Vodafone is rapidly approaching 5G, the super-fast mobile standard for which it will pay 2,4 billion to the State - like Tim - for the frequencies recently awarded by auction billionaire, which ended on October 3, which beat all forecasts for receipts for the state. And he launched the new network that he called Giga Network 4.5G, with speeds exceeding 1 Gigabit per second for now only in Rome and Milan. The "normal" 4.5G, on the other hand, up to 1 Gigabit/second is already available in 17 cities, while 4G coverage reaches 98,1% of the population in over 7.182 Municipalities. Looking at fixed lines, however, there are over 1.600 cities where fiber services are available, 12 of which are covered with fiber at up to 1 Gigabit per second through the agreement with Open Fiber.
The synthesis of these data is that Vodafone wants to be characterized as the number one operator in Italy for quality of voice and mobile data. This too is an open challenge with Tim who just last weekend turned on his first 5G antenna in Turin, the new era of telephony "where everything is super-fast" headlined La Stampa. If the Piedmontese capital has chosen Tim to experiment with the new technology, Vodafone reigns in Milan, which had already implemented its 5G connection in July, the first in Italy and, also in Milan, presented its counter-current offer a few days ago - in a period Of price war and low cost promotions – from 40 euros with Giga, unlimited minutes and messages, a thousand minutes of international calls and 5 Giga of non-EU roaming combined with the new faster network. All with the declared intention of making Milan "the European capital of 5G, thanks also to 40 IoT and AI projects that we have launched with 38 public and private partners", said Fabrizio Rocchio, Technology director of Vodafone Italia. The coverage of Milan in 5G will reach 80% of the metropolitan area by the end of the year and will be completed in 2019.
So far, thanks to the investments made in recent years, the company has won awards that place it at the top of the ranking for mobile network quality (based on the comparative analyzes of P3 Communications, Open Signal and nPerf), a position that deserves it the largest market share (36,7%) has fallen to the top of the business segment in Italy as certified by lawlatest quarterly report of Agcom.
The other terrain on which quality is measured is that of customer service. While abroad, particularly in the USA, there is also starting to think about paid call centers or the introduction of new dedicated services such as the "concierge" - for the higher rate plans - almost as if one were in a large hotel. Basically, low cost services for low cost operators and premium services for premium rate plans. But on this point the game is still open and it is too early to say how operators will adjust in the future.
