News - 4G infrastructure rolling-out next month in UK

[crossy]

thats sweet hopefully smartphone manufacturers can implement 4G in the UK, you know what that means though. T-mobile & Orange will rub it in the faces of the other networks and advertise 4g availability, hopefully they keep their end of the bargain actually delivering the bandwidth speed.

At least someone's had the sense to try and align our 4G with European ones - I had visions of different freq's being used.

Be interesting to see how quickly the 4G rollout proceeds - hopefully lessons were learned from the 3G one, which seemed to me to be a little patchy wrt implementation speeds.

[pctech2012]

Should just require an upgrade of existing sites to begin with.

[keithwalton]

Better 3G would be nice before introducing 4G.

4G is an improvement on 3G as I said before in terms of speed AND range (thus coverage). There is no point throwing money at a system that's about to be replaced.
If you can get a 2G signal you'll be able to get a 4G (800MHz band) signal easily and it will be faster than basic 3G.

As for the other comments ... my intent was to show the big 3 (Voda, O2 & EE) already sell there network to others.
With respect to three the 2g fallback network actually varies by when you joined three or at least it used to. A few years back it used to be either O2 or Orange but not both.
This has been tested down the pub before out in the sticks as to who has a signal or not. When I was on three my fallback network was O2 as I had a 2G signal when my friend on O2 had a signal. But another friend of mine who was also on three at that time only had a signal when the Orange people had a signal.

Needless to say none of us are on three anymore!

My current situation is an interesting one in terms of mobiles, i'm at extreme range to the point only upstairs on one side of the house has any decent signal at all.
My phone currently receives : Orange 3G, T-Mob 2G & 3G, Voda 2G (but has best coverage over the house), Three and a very weak O2 2G.

My phone is with orange and gets limited but speedy signal despite sharing both networks, my friends are on Voda they get a good signal but only 2G.
I have a three hspa+ mifi dongle which peaks at 10mbit down, 1.5mbit up (average 6mbit down, 1mbit up it is very sensitive to location and orientation) it's about twice as fast as my neighbours landline broadband from sky (3mbit down 0.5mbit up)

[HalloweenJack]

Major sarcasm? Actually from my experience it's really depends who you're with.

nope , no csarcasm - why so negative? 3G for me is truely (actually HSDPA) a fantastic experience - even in the `sleepy` town of eastbourne - thats with O2 and vodaphone!

[Steve]

I get good 3G coverage here in Bristol, but I'm usually close enough to a University building that I can hop on Eduroam WiFi. So I'm not fussed about 4G.

[Funkstar]

Am I right in saying that 4G doesn't just improve connection speeds, but improves coverage and total throughput as well?

I seem to remember reading that you can have more simultanious connections on 4G equipemnt and better over all throughput from connected devices. This means better economics for the operators as they can have more people using tha same hardware vs. 3G equipment.

I also seem to think that 4G is an evolution to 3G tech, rather than a whole new platform like they had to install for 3G. Meaning the upgrade from 3g to 4g will be faster, less costly and smoother than when 3G was rolled out. Add to this that any 3G equipment that needs to be replaced by brand new 4G gear and be re-used at sites that are struggling for 3G capacity or don't have 3G at all.

I can't see how any of this is a bad thing at all.

[Sumanji]

And just when I was getting up the courage to leave Orange

Switch to T-Mo?