UK Finally Gets 4G Networking 49
judgecorp writes "The UK has finally got its first 4G network, provided by EE, a new brand from Everything Everywhere, the company formed by the merger of T-Mobile and Orange in the UK. The network will cover 20 million people (about a third of the UK population) in 16 cities by the end of 2012, but right now only engineers are on the network. It will support phones including the expected iPhone 5, and the Nokia Lumia 920."
frequency band? (Score:2)
On what frequency band is it deployed?
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1800Mhz; so if the new iPhone has the same radio hardware as the recent iPad, it won't be compatiable.
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It's kind-of sad that this question even needs to be asked after 3 generations of global mobile telephony.
As Andy Tanenbaum said: "The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.".
You'd think that by now we could agree on a unified solution for 4G.
Re:frequency band? (Score:4, Insightful)
We, as in UK, Europe and the rest of the world have. It is just the USA that is different.
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Is this post wrong, then?
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3109345&cid=41299395 [slashdot.org]
The 1800 MHz Band is one of the three bands that Europe is standardizing on: 800, 1800 and 2600MHz. Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile is for example currently roling out a 1800 MHz network in 100 cities in Germany. Basically all LTE smartphones now headed for the European market support 800/1800/2600 MHz.
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The iPad 3 also supports the 1700 MHz (AWS) LTE band, or it wouldn't work in Canada (700 MHz wasn't auctionned yet).
Changing supported bands isn't hard. Many manufacturers such as Samsung and HTC ships different products for differents countries and the only difference is the supported bands.
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Sadly it seems the delays are due to legal bickering putting back the spectrum auction.
EE have found they have a bunch of spare spectrum as a result of the merger (they also sold some to Three, so expect a limited LTE service from them as well soon). They decided to launch it now, and the industry regulator recognised that it would harm consumers to not allow them to start offering a solution before the auction occurred.
The actual auction will be occurring next year as a result of the bickering from the net
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The press release doesn't say, but they got approval to use 1800 MHz for LTE recently, so I assume it must be 1800.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120821-700757.html [wsj.com]
http://www.zdnet.com/uk/4g-decision-annoys-everything-everywheres-rivals-but-it-will-benefit-consumers-7000002942/ [zdnet.com]
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Yes, it's 1800. It is actually part of their old 2G spectrum, which they are re-using for 4G. The other carriers are annoyed because they have to wait for the real 4G spectrum auctions, which IIRC, were once part of the analogue TV signal. I get the feeling that anyone buying a 4G/LTE phone SIM free will have to check very carefully whether it will work with their carrier of choice. As far as I can see, there are currently no phones that will support what EE are doing in the UK. Please correct me if I am wr
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On what frequency band is it deployed?
Hey, is that you Kenneth?
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UK Broadband have been here operating in Birmingham for well over a year now and have been testing LTE Advanced.
Is EE using LTE or are they deploying LTE Advanced? A conference I attended a year ago O2 and Three were going to roll out LTE-A, they weren't too worried about the late spectrum auction as LTE-A was still in the lab at the time.
LTE? (Score:3)
But is it 4G LTE (100mb/s) or actual 4G (1000mb/s)? I think it's LTE but nothing seems to specify which one it is.
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"We plan to... introduce fast 4G LTE mobile broadband services"
http://everythingeverywhere.com/ [everythingeverywhere.com]
LTE == 4G Lite (Score:2)
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Sorry for my mistake. I got the numbers from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G [wikipedia.org] using the peek download speed, and I used 1000mb/s instead of 1Gb/s to show the difference better.
Here's the sections I based my "true 4G" comment on:
Since the above mentioned first-release versions of Mobile WiMAX and LTE support much less than 1 Gbit/s peak bit rate, they are not fully IMT-Advanced compliant, but are often branded 4G by service providers. On December 6, 2010, ITU-R recognized that these two technologies, as well
Blocked ports? (Score:2)
T-Mobile block SIP, and if I remember correctly, Orange block SMTP that doesn't go through their mail servers. Does anybody know what the situation is with EE?
Re:Blocked ports? (Score:4, Informative)
Orange block SMTP that goes through port 25 but not their mail servers; they will allow you to add email addresses to a list that will be passed through their system unmolested.
Having spoken to Orange tech support, they were quite clear that port 25 was filtered, and that wasn't going to change. There was absolutely no way to get my mail sent on port 25 without passing through their servers. I thanked the tech support guy for his help, having spotted what he was saying between the lines.
Here's a hint - these days, most people should be using SSL or TLS with SMTP...
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Well you should be using port 587 (with or without SSL via STARTTLS command). Maybe one day they will also block port 465 (for the same reasons as port 25). But I can't see them ever blocking 587 as one of the expectations of that port is that you must authenticate to send anything. I've seen some mobile devices default to port 587 already.
Running a mail transport agent (i.e. a system that routes email like Sendmail or MS Exchange) on the end of a charagble per Mb network is a bad idea of everyone.
The se
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Well yeah, exactly - this is what the tech support guy was "saying without saying".
It's worth noting that they block outgoing 25 on ADSL too, presumably for the same reason. There are too many Windows machines still sitting there in people's houses hooked up to ADSL, and every one pumping out spam.
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Just to clarify (in case anybody asks), Orange also block Skype.
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Just to clarify (in case anybody asks), Orange also block Skype.
But T-Mobile don't. There is not yet an EE network, as far as I (as a T-Mobile customer) can see it is just a roaming at present. On my phone I can see which network I am using, internet conectivity seems to work better when connected to T-Mobile.
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Vodafone block TLS for FTP (but not for SMTP oddly).
I have to go through a VPN to connect to certain FTP servers.
wait... (Score:1)