Last year in October, Everything Everywhere, Ltd. (EE) began a rollout of its 4G network. EE is currently the UK’s only live 4G network. On April 2nd, I wrote about EE setting up a fleet of Black (Aqua is the actual color) cabs in London and Birmingham with 4G networking. They are called 4GEE Taxis and will offer the rider free access to its 4G network.
Today, April 9th, 2013, EE has announced that they are planning on doubling the download speeds on its 4G LTE network. EE is still in the midst of rolling out its 4G LTE network across the UK. They expect to have at least 98 percent of the UK population to be on the 4G network by the end of 2014.
Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield are the first cities that EE will offer download speeds of up to 80Mbps. As of now, the 4G rollout is a little more than half way towards reaching their 2014 prediction. 50 UK towns and cities have been set up with the 4G network.
There is an expectation from EE to have one million UK customers by the end of this year. Olaf Swantee, EE’s CEO said that the network already has more than 1,000 business account holders and that its 4G customer base is growing 10 percent week-on-week. He went on to say that extra capacity and faster download speeds were necessary for its customers as the UK is uniquely mobile. They spend an average of around 15 hours per week online. EE estimates that data usage will increase by more than 750 percent within the next three years.
The speed doubling that EE is planning will run alongside the continuing rollout plans. Each month more and more cities are being added to the list. The extra capacity and throughput that will be realized through the 80Mbps speeds will allow for things, such as streaming HD video, multi-tasking and HD photo upload. The higher speeds will also allow the uploading of music, photos and videos to cloud storage and it will make peer-to-peer video and voice calling more reliable.
Edited by
Ashley Caputo
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