Home POLITICS Three UK to Launch 2x Faster 5G Broadband for 25 Cities in August – ISPreview.co.uk

Three UK to Launch 2x Faster 5G Broadband for 25 Cities in August – ISPreview.co.uk

by admin2 admin2
13 views

three uk mobile broadband

Mobile operator Three UK has announced that the £2bn commercial rollout of their new ultrafast 5G mobile network will begin in August 2019, reaching 25 towns and cities across the UK by the end of 2019. The provider is also pledging “at least 2x faster” broadband speeds thanks to their initial spectrum advantage.

At present Three UK has only been testing the new 5G service in limited parts of London and naturally this will be the first city to go live in August, with the other 24 locations (named below) set to follow by the end of 2019. Going forward the operator anticipates that 5G services will account for 80% of its network over the next 3 years.

Crucially the operator, which tends to own less 3G and 4G spectrum than their rivals, has long recognised that they may be better positioned to compete in future 5G services and this is why they gobbled fixed wireless ISP UK Broadband Ltd. for £250m back in 2017 (here). On top of that they recently spent £164m to grab a meagre 20MHz slice of the 3.4GHz band in Ofcom’s auction (here).

The combined impact of the above means that Three UK now has a total of about 144MHz (frequency) across several 5G friendly mobile bands and one of those includes a 100MHz block of contiguous spectrum in the 3.4-3.6GHz band (here), which is ideal for the new service (at present Vodafone only has 50MHz of 5G spectrum, while EE and O2 both hold 40Mhz).

As a result of the above Three UK are promising that their 5G service will be “at least 2x faster” than their rivals, although much of this depends upon whether they can keep up with the capacity requirements in order to fuel that. Rival operator EE, which has just gone live with their own 5G network (here), told consumers to expect speeds of around 100-150Mbpseven in the busiest areas” (i.e. we will expect 200-300Mbps from Three).

NOTE: Last year Three published a study that detailed the impact of 5G wireless broadband services on rival fixed line networks (here).

Admittedly 5G technology itself is designed to cope with peak download speeds of 20Gbps but, just like with 4G and 3G before that, it often takes several years before networks are ready to handle such speeds. Ofcom will also be releasing a lot more spectrum in 2020 (i.e. the 700MHz and 3.6 – 3.8GHz bands), which is needed to support faster services and better coverage.

Dave Dyson, CEO of Three UK, said:

“It’s clear that consumers and businesses want more and more data. We have the UK’s best network for data and we have led the market on customer usage on both 3G and 4G technologies. We have worked hard over a long period of time to be able to offer the best end to end 5G experience. 5G is a game changer for Three, and of course I am excited that we will be the only operator in the UK who can offer true 5G.”

Three’s mobile customers are also known to be particularly data-hungry and consume 3.5x more data per month than the industry average, which is no small part due to their focus on “unlimited” style data and mobile broadband plans. Indeed the company also offers a 4G Home Broadband package with unlimited data from just £22 per month (HomeFi) and they have a dedicated wireless ISP brand called Three Broadband (formerly Relish).

The focus on unlimited data and better speeds suggests that Three’s new 5G upgrade should be particularly attractive to consumers, possibly even enough to the point of stealing away some market share from fixed line broadband networks. Indeed Ovum once predicted that consumers will gobble 13 times more mobile data in 2025 than today, largely due to the advent of 5G.

Unfortunately we don’t yet know how much Three UK intends to charge for their new 5G powered Mobile and Home Broadband products. The details on all that are due to be announced in July 2019 next month, although as an operator Three tends to be aggressively competitive on price. Meanwhile Vodafone intends for their own 4G and 5G plans to cost the same, while EE charges a premium.

Three UK’s 25 5G Launch Cities for 2019


London


Birmingham


Bolton


Bradford


Brighton


Bristol


Cardiff


Coventry


Derby


Edinburgh


Glasgow


Hull


Leeds


Leicester


Liverpool


Manchester


Middlesbrough


Milton Keynes


Nottingham


Reading


Rotherham


Sheffield


Slough


Sunderland


Wolverhampton

It’s worth noting that the operator’s current network investment programme also includes upgrades to their existing 4G network, which are “expected to deliver up to 400% improvements in speed and capacity.” This will be achieved through “deploying more 4G spectrum, converting 3G spectrum to 4G and using advanced antenna technology.”

You may also like

Leave a Comment