Everything Everywhere rolls out the 4G astroturf

Please don't start referring to LTE as 4G. It's just going to give the network operators leeway to brand it like they do in the US and we all know the ASA will be too spineless to do anything about it.

@ Here's an idea, "EE"...

I agree, or just rolling out 3G to the (it seems) 99% of anywhere outside a town where I can't seem to get 3G

LTE is 4G

@Fibbes, re "Please don't start referring to LTE as 4G. It's just going to give the network operators leeway to brand it like they do in the US and we all know the ASA will be too spineless to do anything about it."

Well, I consider LTE to be 4G. What the US carriers are doing (GSM carriers like T-Mobile and AT&T especially) are upgrading their existing HSPA networks then falsely calling an upgraded 3G network is 4G. The earliest 2G networks ran just 9600bps data which overlapped in speed with CDPD over analog (1G). But the GSM and CDMA networks had an upgrade path while CDPD didn't. UMTS (3G) ran at just 384kbps, not much better than EDGE (2G), but EDGE was as far as it'd go while UMTS was just starting down an upgrade path. Same thing now -- a company can tweak out a 3G network to approach LTE speeds, but the LTE network has an upgrade path ahead of it while the HSPA+ network will be about as far as it can go.

Anyway... I don't like the sound of EE really, it seems like a big reduction in competition. But, on the other hand, I like the idea of spectrum being technology neutral. As much as poeple like to laugh at the US's fragmented technology landscape, the fact of the matter is the CDMA carriers here saved loads of money due to CDMA's spectral efficiency compared to 2G GSM, TDMA, or analog (which at the time were all viable competitors, if the US had mandated technology we'd probably be stuck with TDMA still.) More recently, the CDMA carriers had 2.4mbps mobile data (EVDO Revision 0) rolled out over a good portion of their networks by the time UMTS hardware (at just 384kbps) was even available on the market, let alone the 1.8mbps and 3.6mbps upgrades that made UMTS competitive. So, now, the EVDO Rev A (3.1mbps) is falling behind, but since the CDMA carriers started their EVDO upgrades so long ago, that's a sunk cost now and they have no problem moving quickly on LTE upgrades. The GSM carriers here are just falsely renaming their 3G networks 4G, while doing bare minimum LTE upgrades so they can say they are doing some. None of this would have been possible with technology mandates.

Everything Everywhere

A moniker so 'clever' a lobotomised chimp armed with a dictionary and a couple of darts could have done better.

Name apart, no one has done more to argue the toss through legal channels about spectrum use than T'orange Anywhere. The bastard in me would like to see them end up with nothing at all, not least because their customer service is about as informative, friendly and helpful as last Wednesday's Daily Mail.

WTF?

"As well as recruiting media and the less technically literate organisations"

Who the fuck is less technically literate than the media? (Staff at PC World don't count as an "organisation")

Angola will beat us to LTE

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17898861

The process needs to be streamlined by government and an accelerated timetable put in place; the existing 3G operators should be invited to operate 4G networks and an invitation made to other interested parties to at least attempt to increase competition. After that the spectrum should be split based on agreed criteria (market share, proposed investments etc.)

Hoping to cash in on the licensing process will only hold the economy back, so the government should minimise this and recoup on corporation taxes later on.

How about while we all wait.

The networks use this time to fix the existing problems in their current networks...