EE this week rolled out its LTE-Advanced Services across central London, bringing 4G LTE-A connection to large parts of the city including Shoreditch, Old Street, Southbank, Soho, Westminster and Kensington. This is EE's first LTE-A rollout, and according to the company, the service will soon be expanded to cover Greater London and UK's busiest cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester by 2015. The LTE-A service which is rolled out as 4G+ service comes just in time before London starts teeming with shoppers and tourists in the run up to Christmas and the holiday season.
With LTE-A, customers will experience super fast data connection at speeds of 150Mbps (regular speeds will be up to 90Mbps). Given today's consumption of rich media content especially video services and other web-based applications that require higher bandwidth, LTE-A will enable users of LTE-A smart devices to experience the best of what the internet and applications have to offer today. EE said that the rollout of the 4G+ uses EE's 2.6GHz high capacity spectrum and is delivered via ‘carrier aggregation’, combining 20MHz in each of the 1800MHz and 2.6GHz bands for a theoretical maximum speed of 300Mbps. The additional 20MHz of spectrum increases average speeds for all EE 4G customers regardless of device and plan.
EE in its statement said that at the same time, it will continue the expansion of its 4G service beyond the 300 cities and large towns it now covers, with Warwick being the latest on the list of cities with 4G coverage. EE is also expanding it's unique Double Speed 4G service which boasts speeds up to 60 Mbps and which currently covers more than 50% of the UK population to another 20 large towns and cities on top of the existing 20 places it currently offers the service to. EE added that to date, it has more than 6 million customers on its 4G network, making it the largest 4G network in Europe.
Olaf Swantee, CEO at EE
The UK is now back to being a world leader in mobile networks. Just two years since we were behind every developed market from the US to Japan, we’ve invested in innovation, driven competition and given people in London a mobile network that’s faster than almost any other in the world, and even faster than most fibre broadband available here. .......We’re delighted to be able to exclusively offer our business and consumer customers on EE plans the fastest speeds available in the UK. We’re now the largest 4G network in Europe, but it doesn’t stop here. We’ll keep investing to make sure that all our customers can get access to the great mobile technology that can make a real difference to the way they live their digital lives.
Fotis Karonis, CTO at EE
We’re building a network for the future. We’re making sure that there is enough speed, enabled by enough capacity, to let our growing 4GEE customer base do all the amazing things that are just breaking through now – 4K video over 4G, wearable technology, and increasingly sophisticated mobile business apps. Capacity is the lifeblood of a good mobile service, and we’re adding more here to give our customers the best possible mobile experience, now and into the future.
