News - EE’s 4G coverage expands to nine more towns in England

[HEXUS]

Now 45 per cent of the UK population has 4G LTE access!

Read more.

[Animus404]

Balls to EE and their stupid price plans with next to no data.

[starbuck]

I'm confused - all the adverts and hype about 4g is that you can stream faster, download more etc, then your hit with a 500mb or 1gb limit. I can't work out the logic in that.

[Jingee]

Download your limit in an hour, and pay EE a stupid amount of money when you inevitably go over! Huzzah!
On a side note, I think EE should sort out covering THE WHOLE COUNTRY with phone signal, first. Nevermind giving the people of Stockport another reason to take out a pay day loan.

[Andeh13]

oooooh makes me laugh.... ''hit your limit faster up to 4x quicker''

[dcwt2010]

Actually, if you had a 500MB limit and you had decent 4G speeds of around 12Mbs DL you'll use up your allowance in around 6 minutes. So yeah, their advertising make absolutely no sense as it encourages data usage but you don't have the means to do it because the limits are so small!

[Bagpuss]

Someone will make a complaint about the impression given in the Tv adverts...the things they say you can do are completely unrealistic given the data limits.

We'll soon be hearing how they've been forced to drop the adverts.

[Kanoe]

Over £1000 over the life of the plan for the phone? Have Blackberry lost the plot in how to price a phone to sell in vast numbers or is this all EE not subsidising the phone very much and using it to pay back the infrastructure costs of 4G instead?

[rox0r]

I just renewed a contract with Orange, they tried to flog me the whole EE 4G 'experience'. Told them to stuff it. That is all.

[kingpotnoodle]

I think EE should sort out covering THE WHOLE COUNTRY with phone signal, first.

I think "4G" actually makes that easier. The real benefit of LTE won't be the raw speed (which as we all know with wireless technology is hardly ever anywhere near theoretical max anyway), it will be the consistency and reduction of blackspots/ dropouts.

Just because you *could* drain your allowance in 6 mins or whatever doesn't mean you should or would, just stick to normal phone habits and be sensible. Streaming iPlayer, torrents, big downloads etc should done on fixed line, it's hardly essential activity and people doing it on their phones suck up the lions share of bandwidth, slowing the rest of us down, pushing up operating costs and thus also pushing up bills and generally making the useful stuff harder to achieve.

I'd rather useful data services got priority, grabbing maps, internet, VoIP etc and streaming/torrents was banned on cellular networks. I think that's the intention of the 1GB caps - it stops greedy people running away with all the capacity but if you stick to sensible web browsing, maps and other such things then it's more than enough per month.

I've always thought that unlimited cellular data with fixed monthly price is a flawed model, some people do very well out of that whilst other users subsidise them. Low line rental and a small per-MB charge so you genuinely pay for what you use is a fairer system. Trouble is it makes revenue predictions harder for the operators and its a hard sell because people don't like to pay their fair share and want moon-on-a-stick unlimited data at gigabit speeds for £1.99 per millennium.

[shaithis]

I hope they rolled it out to the most affluent parts of the UK as they are the only ones who could possibly justify the price of 4G

[MonkeyL]

So... another 9 towns can be raped by EE. I left them last month, partly because the price plans for their 4G effort were nothing short of a disgrace. A very bad deal, price gouging at it's worst.
Clearly a company that has simply given up on the notion of good value.

[kingpotnoodle]

Clearly a company that has simply given up on the notion of good value.

Monopoly halo products have always been expensive and high-margin... nothing new there.

They do also need to make some money, EE are not a charity - pretty sure the shareholders wouldn't approve of them selling it at cost price! The 4G licences are costing billions when they don't actually need to, they could be dished out for just the admin costs (so you can blame the gov a bit for tax gouging) and the base station equipment and fixed-line backhaul isn't exactly free especially given the increased pipe needed to make 4G actually be faster.

If you don't think it's worth it to you then just don't pay, wait for the inevitable price drop as technology matures and competition increases. I'm in the not worth it camp, I clocked 20Mb on my Nexus 4 before (EE, 3G via T-Mobile) and I don't see the need for more on a mobile device, I've got better things to do on the train than YouTube videos and I'm organised enough to download my music/video before I leave home.

[Spud1]

Their data limits may well be crap, but the speed claims are proving true so far..My work phone is on EE LTE (with a 4gb/month limit) and wow it really is fast. I have just done a speed test - my iPhone 4 on EE 3G gets 6.42mb down and 2.2mb up, but on the LTE iPhone 5 I get 35mb down and 15.6mb up!

This is in north Manchester - its impressive really and a sign of whats to come when the pricing comes down to reasonable levels. Worth noting that my company has about 20 phones with EE and we get unlimited minues/texts and 4gb per handset for £25+Vat a month - so EE clearly can price this well, they just don't have to at the moment.

[MonkeyL]

Monopoly halo products have always been expensive and high-margin... nothing new there.

Sorry, should have been clearer, I mean the service as a whole. The ridiculous 4G rip was just the final thing that made me jump off the fence.

Judging from the recent BBC coverage, I'm not the only one.

[Dark Knight]

Pathetic price and pathetic data limits. 3G works perfectly fine for me so I don't see what is the actual selling-point?

If I really wanted to stream heavy data I would surely use my WiFi connection which outputs approx 20mb.

What data speeds should 4G actually be hitting out around town, if its 12mb as stated above then I'm hugely disappointed.