The 4G race is speeding up!

It’s finally happened other major mobile networks in the UK have announced when they’ll be launching their 4G networks. EE has had a head start on the market as it was given permission by Ofcom to use some of its existing spectrum to offer a 4G service. It has made some inroads but will this give them an advantage now that the other networks are about to launch theirs? 

O2 has announced this week that it’ll start to switch on its 4G network on the 29^th August in London, Leeds and Bradford. The network claims that this will give 5 million people access to the high speed mobile internet service.  13 cities are planned to be activated by the end of 2013 these are as follows London, Leeds, Bradford, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool, Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry, Sheffield, Manchester and Edinburgh.

Vodafone has also announced that it will be launching its 4G network on 29^th August which is the same day as rival network O2. London will also be the first city to get 4G coverage from Vodafone with 12 further cities by the end of the year: Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, and Sheffield.

Once again Three has decided to do things differently. This is necessarily a bad thing as they are the smallest of the UK networks and they are also looking at being the last to launch a 4G network. However this does mean that they’re able to learn from the other networks mistakes, plus there current network already supplies high speeds, but are by no means as fast as 4G. One trump card that they have announced is that they pledge to offer their 4g services as a no-cost upgrade, which looks to be a move that will ruffle a few feathers and may spark a price war. 

It currently looks like 4G offerings will really be hotting up towards the end of the year, when all the networks have gone live and coverage is more comprehensive. Customers will also have to make sure that their device is 4G compatible as most won’t be the LTE version.