EE extends network: Soon, 1 million users will pay us for 4G

A million mobile subscribers will be paying the 4G premium on EE's network by year's end, according to the operator. EE is doubling its network's speed in 10 UK cities so it can keep boasting about being the UK's fastest provider. The million subscribers will be eight per cent of EE's customer base, which it reckons is a …

[Ben Rose]

Maybe Not..

When T-Mobile merged with Orange to form EE, my mobile coverage went down the pan. I'm not exactly sure what they did but I got less signal in many places and in other, where I had full strength, I got no data throughput. It became unusable, nobody listened.

In the end, I decided to cancel and move to another provider - who shall remain nameless so I don't look like I'm representing them.

I called T-Mobile disconnections...there was a VERY long queue. The guy who dealt with me said I wasn't the first with the same complaint and wouldn't be the last.

There may be many people on 4G soon...but I doubt they'll be using EE.

[Vimes]

Re: Maybe Not..

Did you get any ISA server errors when trying to access webpages? I did when I was with Orange - and I had to contend not just with slow speeds and server errors but also customer service people that seemed to want to insist that the problem was really on my handset.

In fairness they do have the largest network - it's just a pity for them that large or not it just doesn't seem to work well...

[Kevin Johnston]

Re: Maybe Not..

That was only one factor that got me looking around for alternatives. When I spoke to the disconnects team they went on and on about how 4G meant I could get my emails at least twice as fast.....big whoop. So that five lines of text comes across in 2mSec instead of 5mSec. Like I react that fast to an alert anyway. Call me old-fashioned but the biggest factor in having a mobile phone is call quality and texts. Yes I have a 'Smartphone' but that is because I can, not because I need it and all these billions they spent on 4G just mean higher bills as far as I can see.

[Kay Burley ate my hamster]

Re: Maybe Not..

Mine too but I stuck with it and after a couple of months it was better than ever. T-Mob have had good 3G for about 2 months now in my bits of London.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe Not..

"When T-Mobile merged with Orange to form EE, my mobile coverage went down the pan. I'm not exactly sure what they did but I got less signal in many places and in other, where I had full strength, I got no data throughput. It became unusable, nobody listened."

Ugh, sympathies. Horrible data performance was one of the reasons that I left Orange in the first place- even with a really strong signal from the cell, the backhaul and underlying network was so utterly feeble that I would have seen better throughput with GSM, a lot of the time.

(The other reasons, for the curious were that the billing system kept overcharging me, so I had to phone up and make them restore matters constantly, and they were spammy. Extremely spammy. Their favourite trick was sending texts in the wee small hours of the morning- I don't pay for service just to be "productized" constantly like that, and find it offensive.)

I am in no rush to go anywhere near EE. Leaving Orange made my smartphone and its successor a useful tool, rather than an expensive frustration.

[LarsG]

Re: Maybe Not, but why do they keep telling me I should switch

As I live in an area where we are barely able to get a 3G signal, why do Orange keep asking me if I was to switch to the 4G tariffs?

I anticipate 4G arriving in this area sometime in 2091.

[TheVogon]

Re: Maybe Not..

I will consider upgrading to EE when it costs less per GB than my 3G Orange connection. At the moment on a service that can deliver more data faster, they want to charge me £5 MORE a month for the same data allowance that I have on 3G to upgrade.?! Good luck with that...

[Cynical user]

Re: Maybe Not..

It's probably only to be expected that disconnections said what they did... they're not exactly going to get people calling up because they're happy with Orange/EE coverage. Disconnections agents tend to speak to people not happy with the operator's service for some reason..

As for the mobile coverage going down the pan, in the first year or so of "two networks running as one", there were always going to be teething problems as the whole roaming/inter-network handover technology was rolled out, and then became seamless. Oh, and the customer-facing staff are far removed from those actually involved in the network. There were some big problems in Northern Ireland too, but those are now almost resolved.

In other words, network service did get worse for a while before it got better - omelette and eggs theory applies. Oh, and I'm not an EE 4G user... 4G is definitely priced for early-adopters which I'm not. But I am seriously impressed with EE's network rollout on 3G & 4G, and a VERY satisfied Orange user on 2G & 3G... having first-hand experience of one of the Cornerstone networks and being very aware of how far behind they are.

Mind, that's one of the other problems - EE (the 4G brand) is competing with Orange & T-Mobile who have excellent 2G & 3G. (cue people with coverage problems on those networks to reply....). Having said all that... competition is a great thing, and the UK telecoms market would not be where it is now if it wasn't for EE very seriously "upping the game".

Rant over!

[Rabbit80]

I won't see 4G for some time I suspect..

Living in a city that is forgotten by telcos, 4G isn't even close to coming for me - however on EE's 3G network, I get speeds of around 17-18Mbps which isn't too shoddy! My landline broadband is pathetic at only 4Mbps though - fiber is supposedly coming in September :(

[MrXavia]

EE, what a joke...

Why would you choose EE with its very limited 4G coverage over Three which has better HSDPA+ coverage and nearly the same speeds as 4G is giving in real world usages and won't charge you extra when their 4G network is turned on!

[Vimes]

3UK however do seem to be willing to throttle VPN usage. I tried connecting on my home connection and the VPN connection seemed to work fine. Connecting through my mobile connection however and I seemed to only get about ~10% of the speed I was getting when not connected to the VPN.

[Andrew Jones 2]

And unless you specifically configured the connection not to do so then by default when connecting to your VPN over the mobile network (any external internet connection) then ALL traffic will be routed over the VPN - so when you request a webpage instead of going [Mobile Device -> Operator -> Internet -> Operator -> Mobile Device] your request instead goes [Mobile Device -> Operator -> VPN -> Internet -> VPN -> Operator -> Mobile Device] and your network speed is pretty much limited by the UPLOAD speed of your VPN connection.

For the record - I never have any problems VPN'ing into my home network via the Three network and accessing the CCTV system with live audio and video and no lagging

[Steve Todd]

How about because

3's 3G service is seriously over subscribed in parts of London and you're lucky to see a few hundred KBs out of it there at peak times. EE's LTE service is easily 50-100 times faster at the same locations.

[MrXavia]

Re: How about because

I'm not surprised, I expect those areas will be one of the first to be upgraded to 4G, it just happens that for my travels Three is best, I get unlimited data and high speeds everywhere I travel normally.

I had a similar issue with Vodafone in London, couldn't even get a few Kb/s let alone a few hundred, yet three was 10+Mb/s.

I actually thing the best option for the consumer is a single physical network, would be the most efficient use of space, but that'll never happen...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an Orange phone but use a 3 sim in my ipad when out and about. As I live out in the middle of nowhere, I was surprised I could still get a signal. I must be the only one using it because it flies.

[Adam Christie-Grant]

Erm...

No interest in 4g at all - At some point I will buy a phone that will utilise it but I have no plans at ALL to upgrade...

[Mark432]

I'm sure this has been talked about before, but unless you're able to offer users 100Mbps out in the field, I thought it was against trading standards to call your network 4G?

I hope the name 4G isn't completely worn out by the time real 4G comes along.

[Steve Todd]

Worn out argument, and wrong

The ITU who define what is or isn't 4G decided to redefine 4G so that both HSPA+ and LTE qualify. If they say LTE is 4G then LTE is 4G, end of argument.

[Mark432]

Re: Worn out argument, and wrong

Thanks, i'm still catching up. I can't believe they sold themselves out. I'll wait til there's actually a noticeable gap between 3g and 4g.

[localzuk]

10% Premium?

Seriously? Have you seen the prices they charge for their data? I have a HTC One with unlimited data, unlimited texts, unlimited T-mobile calls, and 2000 non-network minutes for £21. If I were to use, say, 5GB data, this would cost me £51 under EE... 10%, yeah right.

[Tezfair]

"Soon, 1 million users will pay us for 4G"

Actually, we will as next month they are increasing the monthly contract rate by £1, and it went up only a few months ago too.

[Kay Burley ate my hamster]

What's the point in twice the speed if there is an unfair use policy?

Pointless...

[Michael Jennings]

Slot size

EE have 2x60Mhz at 1800MHz, which will dropp to 2x50MHz in September and then 2x45MHz in 2015 when Three gets the spectrum that EE were obliged to sell in return for T-Mobile and Orange being allowed to merge. As Bill Ray says, there is plenty of room for a 2x20MHz wide slot for LTE in there. T-Mobile have also bought 2x35MHz at 2600MHz, so they can put another 2x20MHz slot in there (and then some) too. (I believe 2x20Mhz is presently the maximum slot size for LTE, although it is very flexible below that). EE can also manage a 2x5MHz slot at 800MHz.

Vodafone have bought 2x20MHz at 2600MHz, and I guess they will go for a 2x20MHz slot there, in addition to a 2x10MHz slot at 800MHz. That sounds sensible, too.

O2 on the other hand have nothing at 2600MHz, only about 2x5MHz (or just over that) at 1800MHz, and 2x10MHz at 800MHz. That doesn't seem a lot. They might be able to recycle some of their 900MHz GSM spectrum at some point, but that is not contiguous and at least some of it is needed for 2G, plus there is not a lot of hardware support right now.

Three have that 2x10MHz (that becomes 2x15MHz in 2015) at 1800MHz from September, and also 2x5MHz at 800MHz.

So Three and O2 will not be able to do that wide slot thing that EE are now doing. I wonder if they will suffer because of this, and if so how much they will suffer.

(There's also the possibility that some 2100MHz 3G spectrum might get recycled at some point. The trouble is that it is full of 3G right now, the spectrum bands still aren't all that wide (2x10MHz for O2, 2x15MHz for Vodafone, and 2x20MHz for EE) and "European" variants of phones don't tend to support this band for LTE at present. (Japanese and Korean variants do, however). We may well get rather unequal performance from different networks for reasons of their spectrum holdings.

[uknutz]

T-Mobile have been good for me!

Was with O2 for 6 years - no 3G. Tried Vodafone - no 3G. Three - good 3G but when I had a problem - wow it was less painful to throw the damn sim away than try and communicate with their CS.

Tried T-Mobile. Great 3G coverage everywhere I have been so far (Dover where I live, Brighton, Derby, Sittingbourne & London). Have 2 phones with them now and can't yet find anything bad to say about them. Certainly brought my 2 smartphones to life again with the 2 fully monty plans I have.

[Jah]

T-mobile are now capping download speeds

Before Christmas I was getting 20mbps download speeds in some areas on T-Mobile but now I never get over 4mbps.

[muppet77]

80 megabytes a second, with the standard 2GB cap... So that would last how

many seconds? Or you could go with one of their eye-wateringly expensive higher caps of 3-4 and push into the minute mark.

My 20 megabytes a second HDSPA connection on 3 with no limit is still looking pretty damn reasonable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't mix up your MB with your Mb

That's 80 megaBITs per second, not BYTEs, so divide that by 8. And, as they say, that's only a theoretical maximum speed, not what you'll actually get. EE reckon you're only going to get about 20Mb/s, which would take much, much longer to pop a 2GB cap. Over 13 1/2 minutes, in fact.

So that's fine, then...

[Anonymous Coward]

"80 megabytes a second, with the standard 2GB cap... So that would last how

many seconds? Or you could go with one of their eye-wateringly expensive higher caps of 3-4 and push into the minute mark. My 20 megabytes a second HDSPA connection on 3 with no limit is still looking pretty damn reasonable."

Your 2GB cap would allow you to download/stream the same amount of data! It would last just as long. It would be busted if you decided to stream/download more content because the connection is faster, you are able to.

4G = The same shite but faster.

In the corporate world, the faster speed do mean more productivity, but it really depends on teh EU's profile. An exec or researcher requiring lots of data would find the service is worth the addtiional spend. On my personal phone, I don't need as much data and I dont need the faster speeds.

[Neil Hoskins]

What a joke

2G around here would be something of a novelty. And I don't live out in the sticks, either.

[Anonymous Coward]

EE's 3G is getting a lot better too

EE's 3G network seems to be improving almost as fast as their 4G network at the moment.

I was in the wilds of Somerset last week and very surprised to get 18.9Mb down on 3G inside the house - that's in an area where the only 3G service is on EE and Three. Neither 02 or Vodafone have any real 3G coverage for around 9 miles in any direction - so even with their "cornerstone" network integration by the two old school networks they will still be trailing the MBNL partners (three and EE).

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you live in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester or Sheffield, and are with EE, then this is probably good news for you."

I'm in Newcastle and achieving up to 40Mbps on some tests!