Data throughput on Vodacom South Africa’s mobile network was 20% higher than normal on Sunday as the company launched a free 1GB promotion that severely strained its service quality.

Complaints streamed in on social media on Sunday as Vodacom launched the free 1GB promotion to mark its twenty years in existence.

Two Vodacom network users on Monday also told ITWeb Africa that they struggled with slow internet speeds and even dropped calls on Sunday.

Vodacom; though, has not detailed exact reasons for the alleged poor network quality in South Africa.

But the company has described, in a statement to ITWeb Africa, how it experienced higher than usual data demand on the weekend.

“More than 8 million people participated in the free data campaign on Sunday. We set a new network record with throughput peaking at 29 Gigabits per second, 20% higher than anything we’d seen before. Data traffic was as much as 150% higher than normal in high-demand areas,” a Vodacom communications representative told ITWeb Africa.

“We’d obviously prefer it if 100% of our customer base was happy with the service yesterday (Sunday), but the essence of innovation is trying out new ideas and taking the occasional risk. This campaign wasn’t only aimed at the tech-savvy customers in the suburbs but all customer groups across the country, and from that point of view it did make a real difference and help to bridge the digital divide.

“Our focus will continue to be on investing in the network to increase capacity, allowing us to bring prices down without impacting quality. We’ve earmarked around R9 billion for capital investment in the current financial year, an increase of roughly 30% on last year,” said the representative.

Consumers; though, have been less patient with the network as Vodacom even trended on Twitter in South Africa on Monday owing to the mobile operator’s poor network performance on Sunday.

Vodacom says it has over 30 million customers in South Africa, making it the biggest mobile network in the country.