BT and EE Aim for UK Launch of Commercial 5G Mobile in 2019

The next generation of ultrafast 5G based Mobile Broadband technology might launch sooner than expected in the United Kingdom after the CEO of BT Group, Gavin Patterson, said that their mobile division (EE) could have a “commercial product launched in the next 18 months.”

At present most people, including telecoms regulator Ofcom, have been expecting that the first commercial services wouldn’t begin wide-scale deployment in the United Kingdom until mid to late 2020. One of the primary reasons for that is because much of the necessary radio spectrum (e.g. 3.4GHz, 700MHz etc.) won’t have been fully released and cleared until that year.

Nevertheless the official standard should be completed by early 2019 and so it might in theory be possible to begin the ground work on a limited early deployment ahead of 2020. At the same time there’s always the possibility that Ofcom’s programme of spectrum clearance might complete ahead of schedule or that they could re-purpose an existing band for use with 5G (EE previously gained a big advantage when the regulator enabled them to launch 4G in the 1800MHz band).

Gavin Patterson said:

“In mobile, we will continue to build 4G to 95% geographic coverage by 2020 and intend to lead the market to 5G, looking to have a commercial product launched within the next 18 months. We’ve already secured 3.4 gigahertz spectrum for 5G, and plan to participate in the 700 megahertz auction.”

However, launching 5G early could have some pros and cons, not least due to the lack of mature hardware both on the customer and network side. It’s probably fairly safe to predict that early 5G kit, particularly Smartphones, will also be battery hogs just like early 4G and 3G kit were.

Plus if it’s anything like prior upgrades then initial services won’t be dramatically faster than the best 4G has to offer (LTE-Advanced networks are already into Gigabit speeds). In reality 18 months would also put such a launch right at the very tail end of 2019, which would still leave the major work to take place during 2020 anyway.

On the other hand there will no doubt be a marketing advantage to delivering 5G before rivals, although this rather assumes that EE’s opponents won’t respond. At present Three UK could actually be one of the best positioned to launch a commercial 5G service early, which is thanks to all the favourable spectrum they gobbled when acquiring UK Broadband Ltd.