Vodafone is promising a major network upgrade across the UK

Sead Fadilpašić
·2 min read
A mobile phone showing the Vodafone logo
A mobile phone showing the Vodafone logo

Vodafone has revealed it is getting closer to completing its Redstream Evolution project, which should significantly upgrade its services for both consumers and business customers.

In a press release, the company said it has already started connecting customers to this new offering, which it describes as “the backbone network that transports all of Vodafone’s telephony, video, and data traffic” in the country over a “superfast nationwide highway of the latest fibre optic technologies.”

What was three separate networks in the past, are now a single Software-Defined Networking-enabled (SDN) core Internet Protocol (IP) transport network.

"Vast improvements"

With the project, Vodafone wants to “vastly improve” the digital experience for all of its customers, claiming Redstream Evolution will introduce greater capacity to meet the needs of a growing customer base and the exponential growth in data consumption.

The company claims it now has 1.2 million home broadband customers - up from 687,000 in February 2020. Furthermore, it claims its customer mobile data consumption rose by 300% between 2019 and 2023, while business customers are “increasingly adopting digital and cloud-based enterprise applications”.

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For Andrea Dona, Chief Network Officer for Vodafone UK, the traditional approach to network management and capacity expansion simply won’t cut it in today’s digital environment. “Data is subject to the same rules as road congestion – if the transport network gets congested, we can’t get where we want to be as quickly as we want to,” Dona explained.

“Redstream Evolution is a significant investment to modernise this critical link in our Vodafone network, creating a new express superhighway bringing more than enough capacity to deliver an amazing network experience for customers today, while also staying well ahead of future data traffic demands. This will be crucial as our home broadband customer base continues to grow, more of our business customers go through digital transformation programs, and 5G and IoT usage rapidly increases the amount of data we use each day.”