Mobile operator EE (BT) has today announced that their new 5G ultrafast mobile broadband network, which started its rollout in May 2019 (here), has now gone live in a further 14 UK cities and towns. Some of the biggest locations include Liverpool, Glasgow, Guildford, Maidstone, Watford and Wolverhampton.
As well as covering new cities and large towns, the mobile giant has also extended 5G to more high footfall places, including Bristol Parkway, Cardiff Castle, and London’s Carnaby Street and Camden Market. Overall the operator aims to have gone live in 45 cities and large towns by the end of 2019.
As Marc Allera, CEO of BT’s consumer division, said: “Switching on 5G in more places is helping us deliver the best mobile experience to our customers, keeping them connected to the things that matter most. RootMetrics’ early 5G testing shows that we are a long way ahead in terms of 5G performance, and our engineers are continuing to build new sites every day, on our journey to keeping our customers connected 100% of the time.”
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Live 5G Sites
Cities
· London
· Edinburgh
· Birmingham
· Belfast
· Manchester
· Cardiff
· Bristol
· Coventry
· Leicester
· Liverpool
· Glasgow
· WolverhamptonTowns
· Ashton-under-Lyne
· Castlereagh
· Chatham
· Clifton
· Dudley
· Gillingham
· Grays
· Guildford
· Hamilton
· Harlow
· Hoddesdon
· Kimberley
· Kingston-upon-Thames
· Lichfield
· Lisburn
· Maidstone
· Milnrow
· Oldham
· Potters Bar
· Rochdale
· Romford
· Salford
· Solihull
· Sutton Coldfield
· Sydenham
· Walsall
· Watford
· West Bromwich
· Huddersfield
Wolverhampton is a city, not a town
and Huddersfield is a town not a city.
I’m not sure how they define these things but it would be interesting to know why they’ve given different labels from the recognised designations 🙂 .
Looks like they’ve fixed the list on their newsroom
Guildford is a City, not a town and why no coverage in Reading?
@5G_Infinity Guildford is still a town, been refused city status multiple times. Locals are still salty about it
Wolverhampton has had 5g for a while now or at least in part
Clearly EE / BT hate the North East
It’s coming to Newcastle by the end of 2019.
Cumbria forgotten yet again
Lisburn is a city not a town.
Does anyone know if EE are supporting full 5G NR voice calls or are they using a hybrid approach? By that I mean falling back to lower versions to take a voice call, which means shorter battery life and/or no 5G speeds whilst calling, similar to what they did with 4G, meaning many phones don’t support VoLTE on EE and so don’t have access to certain frequencies.
Info at https://www.ericsson.com/4a4599/assets/local/digital-services/trending/5g-voice-evolution/4439_infographic_v3.pdf
If there’s anything you want me to do to confirm I’ll happily do this for you but I normally have the VoLTE icon appear during calls and the 5G logo remains though sometimes goes away and doesn’t come back.
Hi @Connor
The acid test I suppose is to make a call, and whilst connected run a speedtest and see if the speeds are indicative of 5G or more like 4G/3G? Many thanks.
@Phill just gave it a go and I continued to pull around 300 during a quick call.
Hi, no 5G voice calls until you have 5G Standalone. Current Non-Standalone 5G uses a 4G LTE core, so all calls are VoLTE or 2G/3G fallback.
So yes you can get 5G data while making a call, same for all operators until they go 5G SA.
@5G_Infinity
So the industry is repeating mistakes of the past and 5G doesn’t support voice calls at launch. This turned out to be a mess for 4G and with patchy support for VoLTE when it arrived and here we go again with 5G.
Just rushing it to market.
VoLTE still patchy support, not all 4G masts and not available on many MVNO
Nothing for Telford? Does EE hate me?
I’m after 5g aswell for Telford I’m on 02 and virgin mobile I’m waiting for them 2 mobile operators to get 5g masts in Telford they taking the mick
I don’t want fixed line broadband I want 5g only
But the problem is, there are not many 5g routers available. So we need to wait a bit to get full potentials of 5g.
Why?
Maidstone. Wow! So unusual for anything to happen in Kent this early in a rollout. Hopefully more Kent towns will follow. For example Canterbury seriously needs better mobile coverage the city centre is basically a mobile signal dead spot.
When is 5G coming to Preston?