Quote:
Originally Posted by everyday
It means upto 150mbps down - There are 8 cat's from what I can see and cat 3 is LTE and 4-8 are LTE advanced.
I hope they don't go to cat 4 and leave out cat 3! or my S4 will be useless! My phone can do 100 down and 50 up but thats all I would ever need from a mobile!
Going back to STM I do wonder how many, if any people have gone from VM to FTTC and if this has freed up the network enough to get rid of it.
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I think you've misunderstoood how the categories work.
Cat 4-8 are NOT LTE Advanced. Only 6-8 are. 1-5 are all standard LTE (3GPP Rel 8). All UK networks are already Cat 4 capable and support all category devices. "Leaving out cat 3" is not a concept that exists. However, only Vodafone and EE will ever be able to exploit the full capabilities of a Cat 4 device. Cat 4 devices will work just fine on 3 and O2 but they will never achieve full speed.
LTE Advanced is fully backwards compatible and will support all previous LTE devices. A phone that does not support LTE-A does not become "useless" once the network upgrades arrive.
As with all broadband services, competition breeds progress, and just as we've seen in the LTE market VM are moving forward too. Unfortunately, one of the places I'm looking into moving to won't have FTTC for another 6 months if ever, though FTTPoD is also going to be available "soon" (it's on a FTTPoD trial exchange) so I may end up back on paltry VM service for a short period
