Tuesday, September 11, 2012

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

1 comment:

Bryallen said...

That sucks. :( I expect there will be some sort of subsidy for providing it to rural areas at some point soon though.

(Been in this coffee shop for three hours now... time to leave, lol.)