EE launches UK's first 5G mobile broadband plans

[HEXUS]

Plans come with the advanced HTC 5G Hub and cost from £50pcm (50GB data) over 2 yrs.

Read more.

[aidanjt]

Hard hard pass. Maybe if it was unlimited data (without asterisks), but 50GB? Jog on.

[Platinum]

50G for £50, hows that ever a home broadband solution?

[lodore]

1. It is EE. They need to sort out coverage of 3G and 4G before starting 5G.
2. 50gb for £50? I could use that up downloading a single game. so much for 5G as an alternative for home internet.
In some parts of Europe they can get limited 1gb fibre for less than 30 euros a month. the UK is way behind due to the monopoly of BT/openreach.

if people are willing to pay this price other companies will offer 5G at the same cost. the only way to avoid the price is for people to boycott it but they won't.
How many people said who cares about the £1000 iphone if you aren't buying it? well guess what Samsung and other companies knew that people was willing to pay £1000 for a phone so they increased the price as well. Lack of innovation in smartphones yet the highest price ever? stupid but people want new and shiny.

[LSG501]

Well seeing as I'm more than likely going to need to wait for the next ice before I get a 5g connection in my area this doesn't really matter much.

However I will say that there is no way I'd pay £50 for just 50GB of data on ANY connection.

[MaddogPepper]

hmmm lets see - £50 for 50GB of data which my family would use in a few days or £35 for 200Mb unlimited broadband from Virgin - tough choice

[Iota]

50G for £50, hows that ever a home broadband solution?

It isn't, this is for the mobile broadband. They haven't released the home broadband product yet.

[watercooled]

1. It is EE. They need to sort out coverage of 3G and 4G before starting 5G.

EE have amongst the highest land mass coverage of any UK provider AFAIK? Having said that, 5G in many ways complements rather than replaces existing technologies at the moment, and RANs will be shared for the initial rollout.

2. 50gb for £50? I could use that up downloading a single game. so much for 5G as an alternative for home internet.

I've been saying this for a long time. Every mobile generation, we have people pretending a radio-based, shared network will somehow replace fixed line broadband on a large scale. All while average data usage continues to climb.

In some parts of Europe they can get limited 1gb fibre for less than 30 euros a month. the UK is way behind due to the monopoly of BT/openreach.

It makes no sense to compare prices in different economies without some perspective. In addition, a lot of that has been effectively state-funded, and down to necessity as their copper networks were not capable of providing the likes of VDSL on a large scale. Plus the massive civil engineering difference of different countries make comparisons less simple.

if people are willing to pay this price other companies will offer 5G at the same cost. the only way to avoid the price is for people to boycott it but they won't.
How many people said who cares about the £1000 iphone if you aren't buying it? well guess what Samsung and other companies knew that people was willing to pay £1000 for a phone so they increased the price as well. Lack of innovation in smartphones yet the highest price ever? stupid but people want new and shiny.

Monthly payments make it very easy to ignore the real cost of things so companies keep pushing prices to see what the market will tolerate. And a disturbing amount of people will tolerate an awful lot! Look what's happened in the GPU market in recent years with the new generation of PCMR (and cryptononsense).

WRT the telecoms market though, data isn't 'free' nor 'unlimited' at the ISP level. I think it's very unreasonable to expect an unlimited package on 5G any time soon as you would obviously have lots of people replacing their fixed line BB, using many TB per month, causing a considerable net loss for the ISP, and degrading the headline network speed they're trying to market at this early stage.

[aniilv]

Went out camping on weekend, 4G connection was about 10x slower than 3G (HSPA+) one. Had to force phone to use only 3G networks because 4G was unusable. Would 5G fix anything? Doubt it.

[watercooled]

That should be a rare situation but it can happen, e.g. with network faults or unusual network load. Networks have band priority lists which should effectively load-balance users dynamically based on things like load, distance from tower (so signal strength), etc.

Out of interest which network were you on? And is it by any chance a rooted phone?

WRT the 5G network helping, it depends what's causing it but it shouldn't really be happening with existing networks. It does provide more available bandwidth and additional technologies allowing for efficient use of the spectrum, though.

[lodore]

I am going on personal experience and not on statistics. They may have coverage in certain areas but not in the places I have either lived or visited which is why I switched to O2.
Anything that can force the monopoly that is Bt /openreach to speed up the rollout of FTTP is as always a good thing except BT wouldn't lose out as they own EE as well...
I feel that a 1st world country should have better internet overall and it seems that Openreach are flocking a dead horse as long as they can.
5G is overkill for mobile connectivity and this is why I think it makes more sense as a alternative for home broadband.

[aniilv]

That should be a rare situation but it can happen, e.g. with network faults or unusual network load. Networks have band priority lists which should effectively load-balance users dynamically based on things like load, distance from tower (so signal strength), etc.

Out of interest which network were you on? And is it by any chance a rooted phone?

three.co.uk, samsung s7, not rooted no, also restarted to make sure its not bugging out like it does sometime. My mr's had same problem where she wouldn't be able stream anything on 4g, so not really phone specific.

I only noticed it when trying to download movie, phone lost 4g signal (too weak) and dropped to 3g but speed went from 20kB/s to 500kB/s. All through VPN so no throttling/filtering possible there.

And yes, its peak time saturday evening so 100% overcrowded 4g network. I'm just baffled that this annoying workaround in necessary. As without forcing the network phone would just bounce back to 4G every now and then. -_-

[watercooled]

Interesting, I'd be inclined to report that as a network fault TBH. I'm not sure how aggressively Three force Idle Reselection but I would have thought it would done a better job of avoiding 4G saturation.

Then again if it's badly congested, maybe they're being careful to keep people off 3G to save room for calls/texts/etc for CSFB. If that's the case though they should be considering capacity upgrades in the area (or they have and the locals are moaning about it).

[watercooled]

I am going on personal experience and not on statistics. They may have coverage in certain areas but not in the places I have either lived or visited which is why I switched to O2.
Anything that can force the monopoly that is Bt /openreach to speed up the rollout of FTTP is as always a good thing except BT wouldn't lose out as they own EE as well...
I feel that a 1st world country should have better internet overall and it seems that Openreach are flocking a dead horse as long as they can.
5G is overkill for mobile connectivity and this is why I think it makes more sense as a alternative for home broadband.

Just realised my last response seemed like a bit of a moany argument. It wasn't meant that way, you just had a couple of interesting points I wanted to reply to!

I think it's really area-dependent. Historically, Vodafone and O2 have had good 2G/3G coverage because of their early start in the mobile market and therefore access to the 900MHz band, something T-Mobile, Orange (now EE) and Three never had. To a point, 800MHz 4G spectrum has helped a great deal with coverage and I've noticed that with Three (marketed as Super Voice because of VoLTE), though some carriers (Three being one of them) will only officially allow phones bought from them directly to use VoLTE. And I'm not certain about others but it appears Three will only allow access to the 800MHz band if VoLTE is enabled. It's one of the things where it can actually make a difference whether you buy from the operator directly or go SIM-only (though a few phones seem to work regardless because they ignore carrier settings). I think part of the reasoning behind that is call reliability - they have an obligation to ensure reliability of calls e.g. for emergency calls, and early-on VoLTE wasn't as reliable as CSFB (dropping back to 3G/2G for calls) so they'd want to ensure said reliability before enabling it. It would be nice to at least use it outside of CSFB coverage but that could get messy to configure. Another interesting point is 4G coverage can be made to lie deliberately inside the existing coverage so you don't end up in a situation where you have a 4G signal, then calls fail because there is no 3G signal to fall back to, hence the thing with 800MHz being VoLTE-only I imagine.

BT/EE are as well placed as anyone to see traffic statistics, produce traffic models, and are the one company (in the UK) that has little to gain by pushing ahead with two supposedly-competing technologies if one would do. Guess who's investing billions into both FTTP and 5G? 5G is capable of reaching far more land mass, far more quickly, than FTTP, and yet their FTTP rollout is still accelerating. In terms of people covered, 5G is also substantially cheaper. Just something to consider.

No doubt BT have sweated their copper network for as long as possible, but with scaling-back G.Fast they do seem to have finally come to the realisation that it's pretty much an obsolete technology before the rollout has really begun. VDSL allowed BT to reach much of the population very quickly with relatively little spending. And, while it may seem like a wasted investment in hindsight, some of the groundwork has been done to allow for future FTTP overbuild with regard to ducting, etc. The fact remains though, FTTP is very labour-intensive to build out, and will take a huge workforce a considerable amount of time to complete. VDSL meant they didn't have to touch the majority of wiring in and around houses, one of the most costly and labour-intensive bits. A single cabinet with a handover point and a relatively minor amount of work in-house could easily serve hundreds of people.

5G does seem overkill for mobile broadband as it stands but 4G's data rates have been getting dragged down due to usage which continues to climb. 5G is an improvement of the technology which amongst other things makes it more scalable, but as an alternative to home broadband? Don't forget average data usage for mobile vs fixed line is separated by an order of magnitude. Maybe two, I'd have to check...

Edit: I'm struggling to find many sources but for some ballpark figures (see links):
Mobile monthly average ~2-3GB overall supposedly, or around 8GB on Three
Fixed monthly average 240GB

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.ph...-to-8-3gb.html
https://kenstechtips.com/index.php/d...-meaning-of-gb
https://simonlydeals.co.uk/news/uk-a...a-usage-1-9gb/
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/asse...ain-report.pdf

[lodore]

Just realised my last response seemed like a bit of a moany argument. It wasn't meant that way, you just had a couple of interesting points I wanted to reply to!

I think it's really area-dependent. Historically, Vodafone and O2 have had good 2G/3G coverage because of their early start in the mobile market and therefore access to the 900MHz band, something T-Mobile, Orange (now EE) and Three never had. To a point, 800MHz 4G spectrum has helped a great deal with coverage and I've noticed that with Three (marketed as Super Voice because of VoLTE), though some carriers (Three being one of them) will only officially allow phones bought from them directly to use VoLTE. And I'm not certain about others but it appears Three will only allow access to the 800MHz band if VoLTE is enabled. It's one of the things where it can actually make a difference whether you buy from the operator directly or go SIM-only (though a few phones seem to work regardless because they ignore carrier settings). I think part of the reasoning behind that is call reliability - they have an obligation to ensure reliability of calls e.g. for emergency calls, and early-on VoLTE wasn't as reliable as CSFB (dropping back to 3G/2G for calls) so they'd want to ensure said reliability before enabling it. It would be nice to at least use it outside of CSFB coverage but that could get messy to configure. Another interesting point is 4G coverage can be made to lie deliberately inside the existing coverage so you don't end up in a situation where you have a 4G signal, then calls fail because there is no 3G signal to fall back to, hence the thing with 800MHz being VoLTE-only I imagine.

BT/EE are as well placed as anyone to see traffic statistics, produce traffic models, and are the one company (in the UK) that has little to gain by pushing ahead with two supposedly-competing technologies if one would do. Guess who's investing billions into both FTTP and 5G? 5G is capable of reaching far more land mass, far more quickly, than FTTP, and yet their FTTP rollout is still accelerating. In terms of people covered, 5G is also substantially cheaper. Just something to consider.

No doubt BT have sweated their copper network for as long as possible, but with scaling-back G.Fast they do seem to have finally come to the realisation that it's pretty much an obsolete technology before the rollout has really begun. VDSL allowed BT to reach much of the population very quickly with relatively little spending. And, while it may seem like a wasted investment in hindsight, some of the groundwork has been done to allow for future FTTP overbuild with regard to ducting, etc. The fact remains though, FTTP is very labour-intensive to build out, and will take a huge workforce a considerable amount of time to complete. VDSL meant they didn't have to touch the majority of wiring in and around houses, one of the most costly and labour-intensive bits. A single cabinet with a handover point and a relatively minor amount of work in-house could easily serve hundreds of people.

5G does seem overkill for mobile broadband as it stands but 4G's data rates have been getting dragged down due to usage which continues to climb. 5G is an improvement of the technology which amongst other things makes it more scalable, but as an alternative to home broadband? Don't forget average data usage for mobile vs fixed line is separated by an order of magnitude. Maybe two, I'd have to check...

Edit: I'm struggling to find many sources but for some ballpark figures (see links):
Mobile monthly average ~2-3GB overall supposedly, or around 8GB on Three
Fixed monthly average 240GB

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.ph...-to-8-3gb.html
https://kenstechtips.com/index.php/d...-meaning-of-gb
https://simonlydeals.co.uk/news/uk-a...a-usage-1-9gb/
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/asse...ain-report.pdf

Thanks for the very detailed response. I was happy with the first response also and didn't consider it moany=)

[peterb]

5G May become a viable alternative for home broadband eventually, but not at the current price point. But early adopters always pay s premium for new technology - look how mobile price plans have reduced over the years. When I had my first phone from Orange, I was paying around £15/ month for 15 minutes/month!

But prices will fall in time and it probably will drive down the cost of fixed line connections, but probably not replace them in all situations. Businesses in particular will continue with fixed line (FTTP) for the guaranteed reliable bandwidth.