I contacted Ofcom regarding the 4G rollout I mentioned in my previous post. They tell me that this is a commercial decision (as I suggested).
To appease my frustration, they did let me know that the Government are committed to providing 2Mbps universally across Britain by .... 2015.  Wow!  2Meg! When the average speed in the UK now is around 9Mbps, I can only imagine what little use 2Meg will be in another two years (and that is assuming we are not going to be somehow "forgotten" here in the backwoods....

Eldest daughter just had 30Mbps installed in her flat in Bristol - and I guess it comes with free calls etc and will cost less than the 25 quid a month I am forced to pay to Talk Talk for half a meg!

4G failure

So EE (the new catchy name for Everything Everywhere, previously Orange and T-Mobile) have announced their 4G rollout. Great news - IF you live in one of the major UK cities.

Yes, 4G is being supplied to those who already have superfast broadband connections, presumably so that they can remain superfast when on their mobiles walking down the street....

Well, as one of the triallists for the 4G in the first place, I was hoping that rural areas would be first to benefit.

Seems to me that economics is driving this rollout. EE will sell lots of nice shiny mobiles with 4G connectivity (I saw the HTC back when we were trialling here - and it was very nice!) and city folks will pay up for the connections. Here in the sticks, wages are low, few people live in the area, so economically un-viable for now at least I suppose. I can imagine that there is some haggling behind the scenes with the various companies asking the government for a bonus to rollout the service to the sticks.

So, my predicitions were right - good news for people who probably don't want or need 4G and bad news for those of us struggling on sub 1Mb/s connections