• MTN has been working to upgrade and optimise its network ahead of the holiday season.
• The telco has made provisions to account for an influx of tourists at popular destinations and coastal towns.
• MTN will be actively monitoring its network on Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and will deploy additional capacity where needed.

For as long as there have been cellphones, South Africans have loved sending a “Merry Christmas” or “Happy New Year” message. However, in the past this trend has brought network operators to their knees. More than that though, the December period sees high concentrations of people in a relatively small area which means network operators need to expand capacity.

This festive season, MTN customers can rest assured they be able to make calls, send texts and surf the web no matter how many people are around them.

This as the network operator has said that it has been hard at working enhancing network capacity to cater for increased traffic over the holiday season. MTN has been working to optimise its network along the N1, N3, N4, N7 and N12 routes. The network operator is also working to improve network capacity at coastal towns and popular tourist destinations.

MTN adds that it will be monitoring network performance on Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and deploy mobile base stations where existing capacity isn’t sufficient.

This is also good news for customers taking advantage of MTN Cloudplay, a game streaming service the telco launched last month.

“We have embarked on a multi-pronged festive season network optimisation drive to improve network capacity and quality in key nodes in order to ensure that our customers enjoy not only seamless network experience but also experience superior service quality on applications enabled by the MTN Network. We will be working very closely with our vendor partners to monitor network and service performance around the clock in near real time, and senior management and regional staff will be on standby to attend to any technical issues that may arise,” says Ernest Paul, general manager of Governance, Quality and Service Creation at MTN South Africa.

The telco says that its network optimisation efforts are guided by input from its regional teams as well as the lessons it has learned from hosting major events. Anybody who has been to a major sporting event or concert will know all to well how network connectivity dies as tens of thousands of people try to connect to one solitary cell tower.

Hopefully, MTN’s efforts bear fruit and folks can get online or call family no matter how many people are at the beach.

Some of the areas and towns that MTN has earmarked as needing an upgrade are Durban, East London, George, Beaufort West, Mthatha, Gqeberha, Queenstown, Swellendam, and Hermanus.

“The festive season network optimisation drive seeks to enrich the experience of our customers who will be travelling throughout the length and breadth of this beautiful country either on holiday or visiting loved ones. MTN believes that its customers deserve world-class network performance wherever they may be, and these upgrades enable us to share that winning feeling with millions of South Africans,” says Paul.

Earlier this year MTN announced that it expanded 5G coverage to 44 percent of the country so customers who have a 5G enabled smartphone will likely be browsing on that network more of the time. You can head here to see which areas in South Africa have 3G, 4G and 5G coverage from MTN.

Just last week MTN launched its own 5G smartphone, the MTN Icon 5G which retails for R2 500 and it may make for a good buy if you’re looking for a smartphone for a student on a budget.