Home
 » ISP News » 
Sponsored Links

Three UK Moot Ultrafast Fixed Wireless Broadband for 40% of Population

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2017 (8:15 am) - Score 10,014

Sources close to mobile operator Three UK are reported to have hinted that the provider is planning to compete with fixed line home broadband services by using their recent £250m acquisition of UK Broadband Ltd (here) to power an ultrafast fixed wireless network, covering 40% of people in UK cities.

Avid readers will know that UKB had long planned to launch a national service via their primary 3.5GHz to 3.6GHz spectrum bands (they also own a bit of spectrum in the 3.9GHz, 28GHz and 40GHz bands), although so far they’ve only succeeded in launching an ‘up to’ 40Mbps capable product via their ISP Relish Wireless by harnessing 4G (LTE) technology around parts of central London, Swindon and Reading.

Relish’s network has also been far from perfect and initially suffered from a lot of disconnection problems. On top of that they’ve struggled to deliver on their advertised service speeds. As such it was generally thought that Three UK’s move to gobble UKB was more about securing extra spectrum for future 4G and 5G based Mobile connectivity than fixed wireless.

However a new report in The Telegraph claims that Three UK is currently mulling a fresh investment that, over the next 3 years, could see UKB’s spectrum being used to deploy an “ultrafast wireless broadband” network to cover 40% of the UK population (mostly city dwellers), which sounds a lot like UKB’s original ambition except that Three UK would be able to use their existing mobile masts to give it a serious boost.

On the other hand this idea doesn’t sound like it’s a million miles from the expected benefits of future 5G based services, which are due to surface from 2020 onwards and will blur the lines between the capabilities and features of traditional ‘Mobile’ (aimed more at a high-mobility / handset environment) and ‘Fixed Wireless’ (aimed more at data hungry / higher speed fixed location home and business users) approaches.

Some operators, such as EE and Three UK, have both played around with using ordinary 4G Mobile as a “Home Broadband” service but those attempts often fell short due to the application of heavy Traffic Management, CGNAT, variable speeds and tightly capped usage allowances. As a result any serious foray into the fixed wireless market would thus have to deliver flexible “unlimited usage” and be able to supply ultrafast speeds to all those who sign-up, which would require Three UK to deliver a significant capacity and infrastructure upgrade (all operators will need to do this for 5G anyway).

At the same time Three UK’s focus on urban areas might run into a challenge from Virgin Media, Openreach (BT) and other fixed line network providers. Virgin already has a 300Mbps+ capable hybrid fibre cable network in those same areas and Openreach are about to start a commercial G.fast roll-out that can deliver similar speeds to many of the same premises, although the latter will take a few years to deploy.

So at the very least Three UK would need to offer something more attractive than both of the above services, which in the short term seems like quite a tall order. On the other hand a number of reports have predicted that future 5G services could be a game changer and one that may eventually make Mobile Broadband more important than Fixed Line Broadband (here and here) for even home users.

However for now 5G, which remains firmly in the pre-standards Research & Development phase, is still more hype than reality and it will have a lot to prove once the first commercial roll-outs begin in 2020. Never the less we wouldn’t be surprised to see Three UK launch a 4G or 5G based fixed wireless style product using UKB’s spectrum but equally rival operators may well do the same.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
Search ISP News
Search ISP Listings
Search ISP Reviews

Comments are closed

Cheap BIG ISPs for 100Mbps+
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Virgin Media UK ISP Logo
Virgin Media £24.00
132Mbps
Gift: None
Shell Energy UK ISP Logo
Shell Energy £26.99
109Mbps
Gift: None
Plusnet UK ISP Logo
Plusnet £27.99
145Mbps
Gift: None
Zen Internet UK ISP Logo
Zen Internet £28.00 - 35.00
100Mbps
Gift: None
Large Availability | View All
Cheapest ISPs for 100Mbps+
Gigaclear UK ISP Logo
Gigaclear £15.00
150Mbps
Gift: None
YouFibre UK ISP Logo
YouFibre £19.99
150Mbps
Gift: None
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
BeFibre UK ISP Logo
BeFibre £21.00
150Mbps
Gift: £25 Love2Shop Card
Hey! Broadband UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Large Availability | View All
The Top 15 Category Tags
  1. FTTP (5473)
  2. BT (3505)
  3. Politics (2525)
  4. Openreach (2291)
  5. Business (2251)
  6. Building Digital UK (2234)
  7. FTTC (2041)
  8. Mobile Broadband (1961)
  9. Statistics (1780)
  10. 4G (1654)
  11. Virgin Media (1608)
  12. Ofcom Regulation (1451)
  13. Fibre Optic (1392)
  14. Wireless Internet (1386)
  15. FTTH (1381)

Helpful ISP Guides and Tips

Promotion
Sponsored

Copyright © 1999 to Present - ISPreview.co.uk - All Rights Reserved - Terms , Privacy and Cookie Policy , Links , Website Rules , Contact
Mastodon