Vodafone 5G Now Live in 15 UK Towns and Cities as Roaming Grows

Vodafone has announced that their new 5G network, which promises average mobile broadband speeds of 150-200Mbps and peaks up to 1Gbps, has now started rolling out into Birkenhead, Bolton, Gatwick, Lancaster, Newbury, Plymouth, Stoke-on-Trent and Wolverhampton after initially only going live in a few major cities.

The live deployment started earlier this month on 3rd July 2019 (here) in the busiest parts of Cardiff, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Glasgow (the Isles of Scilly were also on the list). After today’s update their network is now live in parts of 15 UK towns and cities.

On top of that the operator said they were also widening their 5G roaming footprint today by adding 20 towns and cities across Germany to the 35 places already on their 5G European roaming network, which will go live sometime this summer. Once ready both UK consumers and business customers will be able to roam over 5G in parts of Germany, Italy and Spain at no additional cost.

Nick Jeffery, Vodafone UK CEO, said:

“Vodafone’s global presence means we can provide our consumer and business customers with 5G in more destinations than any other UK provider. Combined with our new unlimited data plans, we are offering customers the best roaming experience ever. They won’t have to hunt for Wi-Fi or rely on often expensive and slow hotel connections; they can use their 5G smartphones to enjoy faster roaming.”

Vodafone added that “customers can also use [our] new unlimited data plans with 5G roaming,” which they said means you won’t be left “worrying about running out of data or running up a large bill” (this is also available on their 4G network across 77 destinations). However they neglect to mention that roaming data itself is not in fact “unlimited” and the small print on their website states: “Roaming data on all unlimited data plans is capped at 25GB per month in inclusive roaming & £6/day roaming destinations.”