Three UK Goes LIVE with 5G and £35 Unlimited Home Broadband Plan

Three UK (Hutchison 3G UK) will today join EE and Vodafone by confirming that their new 5G ultrafast mobile broadband network has finally gone live, starting in busy parts of London with a £35 home broadband ISP alternative. The initial plan is to cover 25 towns and cities by the end of 2019 and deliver “at least 2x faster” speeds.

Crucially the operator, which predicts that 80% of their network traffic today will be covered by 5G within 3 years, will launch their 5G mobile service at no extra cost for subscribers on all their contract, SIM only and PAYG mobile plans. Likewise they will continue to offer “unlimited” data and dedicated mobile broadband plans, which is despite the new network costing more to run.

In keeping with that they’ve also pledged that their 5G network will be “at least 2x faster” at launch than their rivals, which seems likely to reflect the confidence they have in both their recent fibre optic capacity upgrades and the fact that they hold more 5G friendly radio spectrum than any other operator (at least for now).

Overall they can harness a total of about 140MHz (frequency) across several related radio spectrum bands and one of those includes a 100MHz block of contiguous spectrum in the 3.4-3.8GHz band (here), which is known to be the sweet spot for 5G. By comparison their rivals only have smaller slices of the 3.4GHz band to use at launch but this will change as Ofcom auctions off more spectrum.

Despite this it’s still too early to say whether or not Three UK is actually able to deliver on their “2x faster” promise, particularly as testing of early networks doesn’t tell us much because there’s plenty of spare capacity being shared between very few users (most people don’t own a 5G Smartphone yet and so can’t benefit from the new network).

Similarly the operator’s recent beta trial in Camden returned an average download speed of 138Mbps (compared to 25Mbps on their 4G network), which is good but rival EE has told customers to expect speeds of 100-150Mbps “even in the busiest areas” on their 5G network (here). Not exactly 2x faster but this is all very anecdotal and in theory that 100MHz block will give Three UK an edge.

Three UK’s 25 5G Launch Cities for 2019
London
Birmingham
Bolton
Bradford
Brighton
Bristol
Cardiff
Coventry
Derby
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Hull
Leeds
Leicester
Liverpool
Manchester
Middlesbrough
Milton Keynes
Nottingham
Reading
Rotherham
Sheffield
Slough
Sunderland
Wolverhampton

Admittedly 5G technology is designed to cope with peak download speeds of 20Gbps but, just like with 4G and 3G before that, it often takes several years before networks are able to reach even close to the peak design performance. Ofcom will also be releasing a lot more spectrum in 2020 (i.e. the 700MHz and 3.6 – 3.8GHz bands), which is needed to support faster services and better coverage in the future.

We should point out that Three UK recently offered a 4G Home Broadband package with unlimited data from just £22 per month (HomeFi) and they have a dedicated wireless ISP brand called Three Broadband (formerly Relish). Both of these will be getting a big performance boost from their new 5G network.

In terms of Three Broadband, the operator is today launching a single 5G Home Broadband plan with “truly unlimited data” for £35 per month on a 12 month contract. The new package pledges to deliver “fibre-like, ultrafast speeds” and will be accompanied by a new 5G “plug and play” WiFi hub router (we’ll have more details on that later).

Dave Dyson, CEO at Three, said:

“Three’s 5G is going to revolutionise the home broadband experience. No more paying for landline rental, no more waiting for engineers, and even a same day delivery option. It really is the straightforward plug and play broadband that customers have been waiting for.

We’ve taken a simple approach with one single truly unlimited data plan to give customers the opportunity to fully explore 5G and all its exciting possibilities. The ease and immediacy of it all means home broadband using 5G is going to be key to the future of the connected home.”

However we should add that Vodafone has given the operator some competition on the “unlimited” data front with the launch of several new plans (here), although unlike them Three UK isn’t capping their 5G speeds by price.

The launch today may be focused upon their 5G Home Broadband service but we expect Three’s mobile (smartphones etc.) plans to follow shortly.

UPDATE 8:16am

The 5G Hub from Huawei appears able to support up to 64 WiFi connected devices and it also includes 2 x Gigabit Ethernet (LAN) ports. On top of that the WiFi standard appears to be the very latest 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6). By the looks of it they’re using the same exact device as EE (further details).

UPDATE 8:18am

We’ve managed to get a map of Three Broadband’s initial 5G coverage in London.