‘Mid-November is when we expect to be more or less done – about 95%,’ said Sure Group chief executive Alistair Beak.
At the same time, the company has also been upgrading its 4G and 2G networks, which should lead to coverage of the vast majority of the island apart from one or two areas known as ‘not-spots’.
‘I can’t promise at the bottom of a cliff somewhere that you’re still going to get a signal but some of those not-spots that we had before have completely been removed now, and things like indoor coverage will be better as well,’ said Mr Beak.
The 4G network improvements include access to what is called high-definition voice calls – technically known as Voice Over Long-Term Evolution. He said that customers should look in their settings for HD voice or VoLTE to see if their smartphone is compatible and activate it if so. This has been in place for some time but is now being made more widely available.
Those with 5G access will see a major improvement in data speeds.
‘We’re looking at probably about a 20 times increase in speeds, and we’re already seeing that you can get gigabit speeds off the 5G network, which is what we wanted. And that’s going to be across the entire island.’
Another part of the upgrade has been to install only technology from Ericsson.
‘Security is very important here, and it’s one of the reasons why we’re doing this as well,’ he said.
‘We’re utilising Ericsson technology, which is Swedish, and is a part of the EU, and means that we are going to be kind of over-complying with the UK legislation in this area, which basically says that in the UK only a proportion of your network can rely on Huawei or other Chinese suppliers. We will be completely removing that technology.’
Taken with its investment in fibre broadband of £37.5m., Mr Beak said the company had spent a total of about £48m. across the two projects.
At the same time, it has been helping former Airtel customers switch across to Sure, and Mr Beak said that despite a few issues at the start this was now going well, with those customers being issued with new SIM cards to allow them to connect to the new Ericsson hardware like other customers.
But he said that all customers might experience short periods of disruption while the mobile network upgrade is carried out.
‘We get some complaints as we switch a tower off and upgrade it, and then bring it back online, and that does impact people for that period of 24 or 48 hours.
‘We’re just at the moment upgrading the hospital. This is another example of a place where coverage hasn’t been so good in the past, and it’s going to be really improved.’
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