00:00So London's one of the busiest parts of our network, but it doesn't have as many sites, would you believe
00:05it, per unit of population as, let's say, Leeds or Manchester.
00:10Sites on London rooftops are really hard to come by.
00:14And obviously, when we lose one, it's really hard to replace it.
00:18There's that much development going on in London that we're losing sites faster than we can replace them.
00:25And we typically get notice of about 18 months to lose a site, but it can take us anywhere from
00:31two years to even seven years to actually replace that site.
00:35So what happens is in those areas where we lose a site before we replace a site, we've got to
00:40put the load on the surrounding sites.
00:42And that's where our customers and other operators customers, because it's not just an O2 problem, will actually feel the
00:50congestion,
00:50and will feel the capacity issue and might not get the service quality that they expect from a decent mobile
00:56network.
00:57So we've got 20,000 sites or more in the whole of the UK network, in the O2 network.
01:04In London, if you look at a rooftop, typically you might see what looks like a flagpole, it might look
01:10like a plank, it might look like a small box.
01:13But these are the 2G, 3G, 4G and now 5G antennas that we've got on the rooftop.
01:18And as more and more of us use more mobile data every year, we typically see a growth rate of
01:23about 20% in the traffic on the network.
01:26So that means it doubles every four years.
01:29We need to upgrade those towers.
01:31We need to either add more capacity to the existing towers, or we need to start deploying new towers or
01:37new rooftops,
01:38or even small cells on lampposts that you might have seen as well in London.
01:41So that's where the mobile signal comes from.
01:45And as I say, once we lose a central London site, it's so hard to replace it.
01:51And that's why we struggle with capacity in some cases.
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