Remember last week when we reported that all three of the major South African mobile phone networks had failed performance test in an Icasa study? Turns out that it wasn’t strictly true. The regulator has just issued an erratum to its survey of the Western Cape with very different figures for each network.
According to a statement, some of the data in the survey of dropped calls got corrupted, at least as far as the Worcester Route area was concerned. Where Icasa initially wrote that one in five Vodacom calls was dropped, it’s revised that figure down to one in fifty. MTN’s figures also improve – going from 1.12% dropped calls to 0.68% dropped calls, but Cell C actually fared worse in the revision. It’s dropped call rate went from 6.36% to 9.35%.
Of course, while this is exciting news for Vodacom, it doesn’t necessarily give the firm a clean bill of health. In the original report, many areas outside of Worcester Route were flagged as problematic. You can read the full documents here.
Icasa has issued an apology to all the operators.