EE Get the Hump Over Three UK’s “Real 5G” Mobile Advert Claim UPDATE

“If it’s not Three, it’s not real 5G” said Three UK this morning (here) when promoting the launch of their new 5G based ultrafast mobile broadband network. In response rival operator EE (BT) is reported to have lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) over the slogan, which they say is “misleading“.

At present it’s probably unwise for any mobile operators to be making “our 5G is better than your 5G” style absolute claims because all such networks currently suffer from extremely limited – as well as different – coverage and with very few customers able to harness them. This doesn’t make for a particularly representative test of real-world performance.

Not to mention that mobile networks are inherently very variable platforms, which means that their performance can change due to all sorts of different factors, such as your choice of end-user hardware (Smartphone, mobile router etc.) and signal reception as you move around a highly changeable (mobile) environment.

Admittedly this has never stopped operators from trying to bend the advertising rules to their favour before and so the same happened again today when Three UK began promoting their new service on social media – Facebook and Twitter – alongside the slogan: “If it’s not Three, it’s not real #5G.”

Naturally that didn’t go down too well with rival operator EE, which is reported by The Guardian to have lodged a complaint with the ASA. Now if you want to get really picking then we have the ITU’s “minimum requirements” for a 5G network under their IMT-2020 specification (here), which in a dense urban mobile environment would require the network to deliver at least 100Mbps download, 50Mbps upload and 4ms (milliseconds) of latency.

We can’t speak to the latency times yet (not enough data for a solid comparison) but we’ve seen EE, Vodafone and Three UK all delivering above this on 5G for downloads and uploads within their initial patches of coverage (heck they’ve shown the same on 4G too, albeit only in a few areas).

However we suspect Three UK’s slogan stems from the ITU’s other requirement, which is that 5G must be able to harness 100MHz of “bandwidth” (spectrum frequency), which at present only they can do. By comparison Vodafone only has 50MHz of 5G spectrum, while EE and O2 both hold 40MHz in the 3.4GHz band. But crucially this will change next year as Ofcom auctions more spectrum off to the operators.

Nevertheless there are other aspects to the 5G standard and it is not yet clear whether Three UK could prove that they’re able to tick off all of those in order to claim “real 5G.” As we said above, it’s probably a bit too soon for any of the operators to be making such claims. No doubt the ASA will now examine this and, much as usually happens, probably reach a conclusion long after the slogan has finished being used. By then we might at least have enough data to do a better comparison.

UPDATE 20th August 2019

A spokesperson for EE told ISPreview.co.uk: “Three’s claim to be the only real 5G network is entirely false, and deliberately aimed at misleading consumers. Our customers have been using real 5G since we launched the UK’s first 5G network, back in May.”