ouch
Right no point getting the Note 2 LTE version with these prices. I just get the normal one. £31 for 500mb? I seen a deal for 1.5gb on t mobile for same price! Even my current £20 per month contract gives me 750mb.
Everything Everywhere has announced what it will charge for 4G mobile broadband today. Prices for the snappy connection starting at £36 a month. Unfortunately, that'll only feed punters 500MB of data a month, which could be gobbled quickly on a connection with download speeds ten times that of HSPA 3G. That allowance can be …
Those prices quoted are for new users, if you are already a T-Mob or Orange customer you can transfer over with your 4G phone and get 1GB allowance for £26 a month. I'm due an upgrade on T-Mob at the end of the month so going to get the Note II LTE and then transfer across giving me a better package than I currently have on T-Mob. Obviously an effort to get all their customers off Orange and T-Mob brand so they can wind them down.
A 4G mast requires a minimum of a 1Gb connection to each Cell Site and each sell site IS getting a 1Gb connection trust me, where I work we are providing this circuit to the mast's all around the country that we can.
4G is on it's on data connection and doesn't use the same equipment as the 3G services.
Also as the article quotes that the Iphone 5 is 4G compatible, from what I have heard is that it is not 4G compatible but the 5S that comes out next year is, and those people who want a 4G compatible phone from Apple will be forced to buy a 5S.
Leaving aside the grammar, the iPhone 5 *can* use the 4G signal from EE, but only EE; not O2 or the others. This is due to it only operating on the one frequency in the UK. Not that this should matter because only a complete twunt would use 4G at these prices.
And there is no iPhone5S you muppet, so stop rumour trolling / baiting. "Forced to buy a 4S" indeed. Pillock.
Seriously? £31 for a piss poor 500Mb a month?
As someone that moved around a lot for his previous line of work, I was dependant on a 3G dongle to play online gaming (and God forbid I should try to play a game that used P2P like Civ or Company of Heroes). In the space of a month I could *easily* burn through about 3Gb on nightly usage, game updates, driver updates, Teamspeek, Steam, etc, let alone downloading a full game.
No one and I do mean no-one uses 500Mb or more just to look at fricking web pages, which seems to be the delusion that Vodafone and other telecos seem to be living under.
well yes, from what he has said i assume he lives in the 1st world. Not the 3rd world. Maybe its his 1st time around? He dosent speak the language, holds no currancy, he is surrounded by the sounds, the sounds of the market place spinning in infinity, he is a foreign man.......
500 Mb is fine for regular handset usage - it's the plan I'm on right now, and barely use half each month. I use wifi at work and at home anyway for the sake of speed, plus anywhere else that has it (increasing number of restaurant + coffee places these days) - which pretty much just leaves the train journey to/from work.
Of course, hook up the laptop and I could have blown the 500 Mb in minutes - or, for that matter, just pulling down a couple of app updates to the phone. Exactly the sort of cases 4G should be aimed at, in fact: the people (like me!) who have a use for a 500 Mb plan (as opposed to the 10Gb one I have on the tablet, so I can watch video, tether etc) really won't benefit from 4G even if they do get that signal.
I must admit, I saw those prices - having just been looking at 3G sim-only prices for a new c 500 Mb/month plus a few minutes+texts, and settled on a £6.90/month one - and wondered if they'd used some other currency by mistake. Squeeze the monopoly while you can?
they forgot we're still in the middle of a deep economic shit and people are not exactly oveflowing with spare money. I can't believe how stupid they are, they got this 6 - 12 months headstart, a perfect way to lock in as many punters as possible for a good few years to come, as once they join, most of them will stay. Instead they went for a fast buck, but with those caps... they won't get many of us, plebs, to join ;)
With 4G you can now wipe out your pathetic data allowance 10 times faster than 3G users.
All the telcos in the UK are a pile of S**t. What's the point of fast data access if you then end up spending £00's each month be cause you've gone over your allowance.
This is hardly doing anything to improve the UK's reputation as a digital economy. It's a bit like expanding the first mile of a motorway to 8 lanes, and then claiming that this will improve performance across the whole road system.
Before selling the licenses, the government should have stipulated that any operator of 4G MUST offer a minimum of 100GB of data free each month, with defined maximum contention ratios
They didn't. They sold them years ago to Tmo/Orange for something completely different, but in that corrupt way that UK regulation has of doing things, the goalposts shifted overnight on a whim and Ofcom handsomely rewarded spectrum hoarding, as opposed to ruthlessly pursuing the efficient use of spectrum that they shove down the neck of lesser mortals, such as the CAA and users of radio mikes among others.
>Before selling the licenses, the government should have stipulated that...
I'm sorry, your cure for corporate inadequacy requires a competent government interested in serving the well being of its citizens and the proper functioning of the country as a whole. Please try to think of another solution.
100 GB!
Roflmfho!
In other news I hear that Weatherspoons are offering beer at £0.39 a pint because Tesco are offering Value lager at the same price.
You do recall that the MNOs paid a collective £24 billion in that auction AND have to pay for a network as well as giving you a £25 per month iPhone credit agreement? That's £400 per man woman child, customer or not. Would you pay the government for the right to go to work? Do you get a £600 phone from BT or VM and do they pay for the rights to lay copper and fibre?
Yeah right.
Option 1: Undercut your competition and hope that enough people notice to get them to sign up to you instead, then further hope that you don't spark a price war, which would damage your profits.
Option 2: See that competition is charging outrageous prices and getting away with it, therefore charge same outrageous prices and get a slice of that pie while you can!
Guess which one is more likely to happen...
Relative to the download speeds allowed. Nice of them to offer to replace my S3 with the LTE version for 99 squids but I'm perfectly happy on my £15.50 a month tariff (especially since the Orange WiFi app automatically connects me to BT hotspots when I'm out and about and all the Orange subscribers I regularly call are magic numbers).
£36 per Month for 500mb on a 24 month contract? That's £864 for 12gb or £72 per gigabyte or the best part of a thousand quid for the ability to download one game a year off Steam.
You sure they re-branded to "EE" and it's not actually "FU"?
Fuck EE anyway, they sent me a spam SMS at 07:50 on a Sunday morning. It advertised their LTE service in an area that's not covered for a phone I don't want.
Straw. Camel's back. I got my PAC the next day.
My other half, formerly an Orange customer, had no service all day then 12 text messages at 4 in the fecking morning. Her brother who dares not to live in a city has been kicked off the new EE network altogether due to them deciding to turn off half the stations they've inherited. They can stuff their 4G snugly into the deepest part of their collective back-oassage.
I have no intention of getting a 4G contract when I upgrade in a couple of months - 3G is fast enough for the browsing I do on my phone right now and I'd rather not pay the costs of having 4G - both in terms of money and the hit on battery life.
As long as I can still get a decent contract from them without being forced into LTE, I'll be happy. If not, I'll move.
.... and with high speeds too.
With HSDPA+ up to 21mbps ( I get 16 on a regular basis) and all you can eat data for 15 quid. And I am on PAYG.
Appears to me that a lot of people are being suckered into 4G when they don't even take advantage of what they already have.
Oh, N1 London Balls Pond Road area for anyone who cares to know where I get that speed.
My contract ended last month so I was waiting around for three companies to pull their fingers out: Nokia, to reveal pricing and release dates of their new fancy Lumia 920, Microsoft to reveal the release date of their new fancy Windows Phone 8 and to allow Nokia to reveal the pricing and release dates of their new fancy Lumia and EE to reveal the release date and pricing of their new fancy 4G service...to allow Nokia's new fancy Lumia running Microsoft's new fancy Windows Phone 8 to run on the new fancy 4G network.
I'm glad I didn't bother in the end, I got a £13/month SIM only plan. Here's a note to telco, mobile and software companies the world over: when you announce something, don't wait too long to sell it and when you do, DON'T CHARGE TOO MUCH MORE THAN IT'S WORTH BECAUSE PEOPLE AREN'T FUCKING STUPID
Got to laugh.
If you actually look at the EE website, you'll see those prices are inclusive of handset subsidies. So they aren't true prices.
The actual prices (without handset) are....
ALREADY GOT A 4G READY PHONE?
OUR SIM ONLY PLANS GIVE YOU 4GEE TO GO WITH IT. All 4GEE SIM ONLY PLANS COME WITH UNLIMITED CALLS AND TEXTS.
500MB £21
1GB £26
3GB £31
5GB £36
Still bad, but nearly half the price of the headline grabbing figures above, and not that far off Oranges SIM only prices.
What will be interesting, is what the handset subsidies are like. If they are competitive for something like an iPhone, or SIII, then it could be a whole different game.
The interesting thing is that even on those prices, 500MB costs you 4.2p per MB, but if you're a data hog, then 5GB is only 0.72p per MB.
Why is that data hogs are magically cheaper to serve? Is their data demand magically compressible? Are the costs of online billing lower when you have more zeros on them? Thought not.
The pricing structure is merely gouging, intended to deter mass adoption (perhaps because EE couldn't cope, possibly to preserve the legacy Torange user base), and probably hoping to set a new benchmark entry price.
Maybe they are right, of course, Apple users queue up to be reamed out for a so-so product, and maybe they'll need an LTE contract to boast about in Starbucks with their iPhone 5, overlooking that this is seven minutes of data download, or whatever.
Those rates give you unlimited calls and texts, I assume you ascribe some value for them, otherwise you'd have a dongle rather than a phone.
There are both fixed and variable costs in servicing a line. That's why companies like BT charge line rental plus a per call charge. It's hardly unusual that the cost per item comes down the more of them that you buy.
The problem here is that EE don't have a nationwide 4G network this means that if they did give you 100GB of data to use you would need to be able to consume it on 4G and 3G and 2G.
Now they could say you can have 100GB of data on 4G and 500MB on legacy networks but this would be a hugely confusing model for most people.
I take it all these packages are advertised as unlimited?
If you look at the EE site it seems the pricing is a little more complicated.
e.g if you already have a 4G phone and you want a sim only deal 5GB a month is £36, still expensive but not as bad.
If you just want data you can get a data only plan which according to the website is significantly cheaper for 18 months than it is for 24 months - £26 for 5GB over 18 months or £36 for 5GB over 24 months.
4G LTE peak rate is approx 300Mbit/s, understood that Mr Av. Punter isn't likely to see that often, but 500MB data allowance at peak rate...
300Mbit/s divided by 8 (bits in a byte) = 37.5MB/s
500MB divided by 37.5MB/s = 13.33s
You can spend just over 13 seconds a month downloading things... ?!
But no-one in the world is providing a 300Mbit service. The best you're likely to get in practice at the moment is about 40Mbit. Blowing through 512MB on that would take you near 2 minutes, and that's only if you are being foolish enough to download a file that size. It should be good enough for a number of hours of constant web browsing.
Those cheaper plans suggest they must think we're all a bit dense - what on earth is the point of an allegedly* fast connection with a 500mb data allowance? With the unhealthy size of webpages (and the bloody ads) these days you can clock that with a few days browsing of El Reg + the Beeb. There's not going to be a lot left for that Full HD grumblefick extravaganza they've been alluding to to pimp the service - 500 meg won't get you much further than the copyright notices, titles and a bit of introductory Bulgarian Airbag action before your bandwidth's throttled back to the glory days of postage stamp sized Realplayer for the actual gruntfest. From memory of the spectacularly over optimistic 3G launch era, the "EE movie streaming service" seems unlikely to offer much more than a bit of free b-roll to demo your new fat pipe to admiring mates**.
It's a bit of dead giveaway they're chucking in minutes galore isn't it - as if no one would notice that voice and data aren't quite the same thing. That really was the point wasn't it - spend a mint on a fast*** data connection because what you really want is a thousand more opportunities to vocalise "I'm on the train" after a liquid workout at the Stoat and Black Pudding.
Sure, you can bump up the ante and get a workable slice of data by chaining yourself to 50 quid odd for two years from a company whose track record with speedy 3G left much to be desired. Personally, I'll stick to the cheap as chips 3G for now thanks, and save the bragging for 2017 when they're begging.
That said, at least this time they won't be pimping ringtones as the must have.
* throttling and inadequate provisioning may apply (see onerous T+Cs)
** Requires proximity to a major road in one of 10 desirable localities
*** The actual value of fast may depend on marketing, weather or proximity to Silicon Roundabout
Having just upgraded and checked T's and C's with the agent on the phone I was confidently told my T-Mob contract included unlimited web browsing and email syncing. the 750mb data allowance figure I was given was for downloads and streaming etc. Having burnt through 2 boosters (50mb and 10mb) in 4 days on holiday I wanted confirmation. Should be the same on a 4g deal too.
Well done EE, 500mb for 36 quid?
If the real-world download speed of their LTE network is 30mbps that means you can eat your 500mb in 133 seconds.
Or put another way when downloading at 30mbps you'd be spending 27p per/sec!
Better not click on a file download link by accident on their network..... Cancel the download in four seconds and you've already burned through over a quid's worth of your data bundle, that my friends doesn't just suck it blows chunks
The problem is that there are all these freetards that have bought an "unlimited" 3G contract and are determined to get the most out of it. The result is that the network slows to a crawl at lunch times and doesn't pick up much during the afternoon.
4G promises to fix that, though in the short term at least it's being sold as a premium service. The same kind of thing happened when 3G launched BTW, you had a whole bunch of cheapskates who complained that it was expensive and limited in coverage, and there was no way that they would be paying for it.
This is pretty much an incremental upgrade.
(You could get the sort of speeds they are offering under HSPA+)
They should do LTE at 800mhz that would be good.
Indoors O2 & Vodafone at 900mhz is great signal quality compared to Three / EE
It is a marketing exercise. (4G Did mean 100Mb/s moving / 1000Mb/s stationary)
40Mb Down / 20Mb up is not really that much better than what Three has already.
(Probably less places will get it).
THree use the 3g DC-HSPA+(42mb) that shares HSPA+(21mb/14mb) and HSDPA 7.2mb so real speeds on three tend to be more around 3-10mb on tablet/Dongles that support DC-HSPA+ (42mb) as i know of no phone that supports DC-HSPA+
LTE 100mb is first 4g tech in the UK (up to 100-150mb on tablets all mobile phones 100mb Not moving,, USeable most likey 20-60mb to begin with until more uses start to use it) is what's been implemented in the UK
LTE-ADV will be the one that supports up to 1000mb not moving (500-600mb usable per device) and 100mb when moving at high speed (like an train), next 3-7 years
"i know of no phone that supports DC-HSPA+"
Of the phones generally available in the UK, Sony Xperia T, one of the Nokia Lumias, and the iPhone 5 all have DC-42 support.
In addition all the LTE capable handsets can do DC-42, but there aren't many UK networks selling these yet ....
Got my Note 2 (non LTE) version happily slurping my 'old' T-Mobile Android 3GB monthly allowance for under £5 a month - was a £10 a month contract but it ended and decided to stick with contract alone and buy the phone sim free and unlocked from Amazon.
Quick snip snip with the scissors and I had a micro sim to fit.
1: It would be nice if they sorted out their 2g/3g coverage first. Where I live, there is no 3g for at least 10 miles square on any network. In the nearest big town there is 3g coverage, but its so oversubscribed that you would be hard pressed to notice the diference to an edge connection. At my house there is between 1 and no bars on 2g outside, nothing inside.
2: Those prices and data allowences are ridiculous, at full speed your entire allowence has gone in a few minutes. Whats the point in that?
Also, if it has to fall back to 3g/edge/gprs over large swaithes of the country, its really bad value for money compared to an unlimited 3g tarriff. In fact, you would have to be a bit of a fool to buy into it at this point in time.
at those silly caps. You'd think that the whole point of LTE was to get A LOT OF data A LOT faster. Instead, you're going to get VERY LITTLE data A LOT faster (for seriously silly money, given how little data). So why would anyone want this service? To open this or that page, or email half a second faster? To show your mates this cool youtube vid, like it's f... fast, maaaaan!
It would be really sad if it turns out they were right and lots of people are really that stupid to sign up for this service and pay for nothing. And, if they're successful, their competitors next year will have no incentive to come up with lower prices, why would they?
I have personally installed O2's 4G backhaul fibre transmission equipment (between their core switching sites) in Slough, Yate and Birmingham, and I will be involved in the same for Vodafone in the near future. I'm sure EE have installed similar, as the bandwidth demands for 4G are far too much for existing 3G backhaul networks to just swallow (although the core backhaul is the same technology - Layer 2 Ethernet switching over DWDM links).