Vodafone has finally made moves to correct the storm of bad publicity led by plummeting consumer satisfaction levels. Vodafone has announced that it will replace all 2G and 3G equipment at all Australian base stations, in an effort to improve mobile coverage and download speeds.

Under the deal, Chinese vendor Huawei will replace Vodafone’s entire 2G/3G network with its SingleRAN solution, which can accommodate 2G, 3G and LTE technologies in a single base station.

But the service changes alone may not be enough to win back the scorned Vodafone customers.

“Vodafone is not out of the woods yet,” says Ovum’s senior analyst Nicole McCormick. “This network overhaul is long overdue, and Vodafone and Huawei will need to proceed quickly to deploy the network infrastructure, which includes 42Mbps HSPA+ at 850MHz, to address Vodafone’s network capacity issues.”

Andrew Wilson, founding partner of The Other Dimension and Marketing magazine blogger, thinks the upgrades are an important step for Vodafone, but need to be supported by other brand communication improvements.

“It’s important for Vodafone to get their customers' trust back,” Wilson tells Marketing magazine. “This will go some way, but they need to spend money educating customers on the improvements to the system, rather than just continuing to focus on price given the recent problems.”

“I think it probably comes down to their customer service as well,” he says. “The company weren’t up front with the problems in the first place, and when the apologies came is was too little, too late.”

Read Andrew Wilson’s opinion piece about Vodafone’s troubles