The owners of third-ranked mobile player Vodafone say they are committed to the Australian market amid mounting speculation that telco provider TPG Telecom could make a play for the group.
Vodafone Hutchison Australia chief executive Inaki Berroeta said the group's two owners, Vodafone Group and Hutchison Whampoa, are "committed" to the business, which has made strides since a string of network outages in late 2010 and 2011 that became known as "Vodafail".
The woes saw a mass exodus of customers and damaged the group's reputation.
"The committment by the two shareholders is quite big," Mr Berroeta told AAP during an interview at the group's headquarters in North Sydney.
"You just need to look at the level of investment that we've had here in the last few years, which has been huge," he said.
Around $4 billion has been spent on improving VHA's network coverage and reliability over the last four years.
VHA, which operates across Australia as Vodafone, has also switched to the faster 4G network from 3G.
"Virtually all of our network is 4G," Mr Berroeta said, noting that group's coverage is close to 97 per cent of the Australian population.
Further investment, including the acquisition of more spectrum for around $600 million from the federal government, and a possible move into the broadband market as the National Broadband Network rolls out, is also on the drawing board.
The new spectrum will be used down the track to support customer demand for data, given the rising popularity of watching videos via Netflix, Facebook, or YouTube on their smartphones.
Mr Berroeta believes the two shareholders are "quite happy", given the group's improving performance.
TPG - Australia's second biggest fixed-line broadband provider after Telstra which is notoriously media shy, couldn't be reached for comment.
Mr Berroeta said VHA continued to grow its consumer and business customer base but was tight-lipped on specific figures ahead of the group's interim results on July 29.
VHA's customer base rose by 2.5 per cent to more than 5.4 million in 2015 from 2014, helped by TPG moving its mobile customers across from Optus but still below the seven million customers the company had before its network problems.
Market leader Telstra had around 16.9 million mobile customers at the end of December while second-ranked Optus boasts some 9.4 million mobile customers.
VHA's average revenue per user - a key figure tracked by telco analysts - was $52.38 in 2015, up 3.1 per cent from a year ago.
The company recently launched marketing campaign to promote the reliability of its network in the wake of Telstra's seven network outages since February.
VHA is carrying the broadcast signal from a program the Nova radio network and live weather spots on the Seven and Prime TV networks as part of the campaign.
Mr Berroeta declined to comment directly on Telstra's network woes but conceded it did help mobile users realise that there are other mobile operators in the market, with little difference to the service quality.
