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.