The company has already announced one contract between its Irish operation and Continual, an Israel-based analytics company, but Capacity understands that the project covers the whole group.
“Vodafone Ireland places a high value on the performance of its mobile network along roads and motorways, and our decision to expand our use of Continual’s solution will reinforce our strategy to maintain leadership in the Irish market,” said Didier Clavero (pictured), CTO of Vodafone Ireland, earlier in May. “We are also utilising the solution to plan the efficient usage of spectrum.”
But the clue that this is about more than Ireland came in an announcement from Continual last week, when the company talked of “one of the world’s leading telecoms groups” that “will deploy a shared mobility experience platform to be used by all its subsidiary operators”.
Capacity understands that the group referred to is Vodafone and that this project is directly related to ensuring Vodafone’s networks can be used for connected cars and internet of things (IoT) applications.
In Ireland, the system is already in use along the M1 motorway north of Dublin, where it “is monitoring and optimizing connectivity for cars, IoT devices, and handsets in mobility”, said Continual.
Greg Snipper, CEO of Continual, said: “Our enhanced business relationship builds on more than three years of extensive collaborative research into the application of advanced network data analytics for mobility use cases, including the use of crowd and commuter analytics.”
Vodafone was not named in last week’s announcement, but Capacity understands the service will be rolled out across the group’s other main businesses.
Snipper said: “This means that we are improving mobility experience on billions of journeys and for over 150 million mobile subscribers all around the world.”
No value has been put on the work, but Continual said that it is a “multi-year contract” that “further emphasises the growing recognition among mobile network operators of the effectiveness of Continual’s solution in optimising and enhancing mobility experience”.
