Vodafone announces 4G roll-out for Germany
Vodafone has announced its 4G roll-out for Germany, though it seems it'll be Americans making the first 4G phone call. Vodafone Germany will have LTE coverage in 1,000 municipalities by Christmas, and Vodafone promises a national network by the end of 2011. That will be a data network using dongles for connecting laptops, in …
I still can't 3G in 50% of London, mind you, I am on Vodafone.
No Vodafone 3G in Oxford either 90%+ of the time. Just GPRS or Edge if I'm lucky. I do sometimes wonder why they bother advertising all the whizzy things you can do with internet-enabled smartphones these days when it takes several minutes to download a simple webpage or make a google search.
Are we the only country where this spectrum auction happens?
I can't believe we are being left behind while the US and Germany pioneer onwards with 4G. I'm surprised the government doesn't push the 4G spectrum auction as they will be getting money for nothing to patch up the deficit.
WTF as I want 4G now!
No Richard, we are not, but that should not be an excuse for being so late.
"All this action follows on from last year's auctions, when the German government sold off a whole bundle of radio spectrum for a combined price of €4.4bn."
Still waiting for number 3. Hell, 2 is hit and miss affair with O2.
This summer i drove through Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and back to the UK through Italy and France. (fyi, I am an o2 user)
I could get 3G everywhere with very small exceptions while in France.
Here in the UK i was starting to wonder whether my BB9700 was broken as i can only think of two or three places i managed to get 3G and i couldn't even use it to give or receive calls.
Rip off Britain is alive and well..
You can get WiMAX in quite a few places, also outside Dublin.
"That's a high price compared to ADSL, but (coverage allowing) the Vodafone offering makes home broadband redundant, so is better compared to a combination of mobile and fixed broadband."
Does LTE get around the often ridiculous (1-2 seconds+) latency suffered with 3G? If not I'll be sticking with my cheaper home connection + legacy 3G package.
"Does LTE get around the often ridiculous (1-2 seconds+) latency suffered with 3G?"
In theory, yes. Latency should be exceptionally low (tens of milliseconds) and bandwidth very much greater.
But I think the telco industry also said something similar about 3G, 2G, WAP, and even 56k modems. So it may not turn out that way in practice.
Considering the bloody mess that the mobile phone companies got themselves into, paying a combined £22.5bn for their 3G licences, it makes sense to hold back.
Let a few other countries determine the business model and iron out the kinks before we go down that road.
No-one, except a handful of companies, wanted to pay several £££ per MB of data. So the mocos in the UK had masses of unused bandwidth and big debts to pay off after they bought their licences. Once they went flat rate, data usage rocketed such that 3G networks now congestion and slow speeds.
The mobile companies had forked out so much money, they were forced to make it back with higher contract fees and call charges. Phone subsidies are not the only reason they're moving to 18 and 24 month contracts.
So for a change, let's not be the guinea pigs with a new technology. Once they've figured out what the demand for bandwidth will be, based on other markets, they can make an educated bid for some spectrum, without hobbling the entire industry from the outset.
30 Mbit/s up, 80 Mbit/s odd down. Theoretical 100 Mbit down. Already in Sweden's largest two cities, and rolling out to many others. Only with a dongle so far though.
Nearly as amusing as the word "dongle" is the reaction of the iPhone 4G owners here who find out that they don't have 4G on their phones....
"Better than compared to fixed and mobile broadband" ?? Really ??
My home broadband costs me a total of £33 a month (for the BT line and a 20Mb down and 2.2Mb up line from Be*) and my mobile broadband costs me £10 a month (t-mobile, sim only, unlimited texts and internet).
At home I have no restrictions on downloads and on the move is just fair usage (which is fair enough, I have no intention of using that much whilst on the move).
So for a total bill of £43.
How is Vodafone's offering even remotely comparable ?
This article is misleading, LTE is not a 4G technology, LTE is a 3G technology.
According to the ITU-T definitions, 4G provides theoretical speeds of 1Gb/s, and no commercially available system is able to attain this speed yet.
Don't get sucked in by the marketing rubbish. Every operator with WiMAX or LTE mentions "4G", but this doesn't mean that you should believe them.
What about the HTC Evo that the yanks have been running for a few months now?
Anyone know what frequency range they're using for it in Germany? I assume we'll have it in the 900MHz space when O2 and Vodafone move out of the way?
800 MHz
- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/21/german_4g_auction/
- http://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/cln_1911/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/EN/2010/100830AllotmentFrequBlocks.html?nn=48242
- http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/project-pages/ddr/
- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/11/uk_spectrum_plan/
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