[Chrysalis]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Everyone has had over 99% on 2G for a decade or more, and that was pre-mergers. EE currently claims 99.8% And again EE are planning to upgrade "all" 2G sites to 4G by the end of 2014. EE and 3 also claim 98% on 3G, not sure about the others.

3 will not take long at all to do their rollout. Not only are they're sharing infrastructure with EE, but in fact, most EE 4G signals actually come from 3's 3G transmitters. Since most EE 4G transmitters actually belong to 3 (well, originally belonged to 3 but are now shared under the MBNL agreement) and are existing 3G sites with upgraded radios bolted on the side, most of the work has already been done.

Since 3 and EE are largely sharing the same physical infrastructure and equipment, it'll be Cat 4 and above from the outset, EE intend to introduce LTE-Advanced in short order, AFAIK all the shared sites are running multimode, multiband software defined radios anyway. EE have the spectrum to introduce (and will be trialling) up to 450Mbps by the end of the year, 3 won't, even on the same spectrum. The problem with 3 is they have the least capacity of everyone but O2, and as I've said before, cheap tariffs, unlimited usage, and low capacity are not a good combination.


And we all know that all turned out on VM... At least VM has some control of node sizes...

O2's 4G auction results do look bad but I believe they will be using the BT capacity as well (BT brought some 4G).

Still 4G will be a niche thing for at least a few years.