The financial health of Southern Europe might be giving Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD) CEO Vittorio Colao some sleepness nights at the moment, but he isn't at all worried about backhaul.

Struggling markets such as Spain and Italy are weighing down Vodafone's financials, as was shown Tuesday when the operator unveiled its numbers for the first half of its fiscal year. (See Euronews: Vodafone Stung in Southern Europe and Vodafone Posts H1 Loss of £1.88B.)

But when it comes to his networks, Colao is confident there's enough capacity to handle the rising levels of data traffic, particularly in Vodafone's backhaul networks.

Speaking at the operator's earnings presentation in London Tuesday, Colao highlighted how much backhaul capacity Vodafone has built into its network during the past year. Apparently, he is often asked, "What about the backhaul, Vittorio?"

The answer, it seems, is that at the close of the six-month period ending Sept. 30, Vodafone had backhaul capacity of 1 Gbit/s or higher across 47 percent of its European network footprint. That's up from 29 percent of its European network at the same time last year.

Is that enough capacity per base station site? Colao thinks so. He tasked CTO Steve Pusey to come up with a theoretical maximum throughput that a base station site could achieve. This theoretical base station site would be running LTE at 2600MHz, LTE at 800MHz, 3G at 2100MHz and 3G at 800MHz on three sectors, and if each technology hit peak speeds the total throughput would, by Vodafone's calculation, reach 930Mbit/s -- just under the 1Gbit/s backhaul capacity.

That's hypothetical, though; the demands placed on actual base stations don't quite match those levels, giving Vodafone some room to grow into that network capacity (at least for now). Currently, the operator's smartphone customers account for just 30 percent of its total European subscriber base, although nearly 50 percent of its contract customers in Europe have the data-hungry devices.

Vodafone also provided some other updates on its European networks and data usage during the half-year results presentation:

— Michelle Donegan, European Editor, Light Reading Mobile