Three UK Coughs to “slightly” Delayed Rollout of 5G Mobile
Mobile operator Three UK (Hutchison 3G UK) has today revealed that the rollout of their new 5G mobile network is running “slightly behind” their original plan, which they suggest is due to some issues with planning permission, securing the right backhaul capacity and migration to their new cloud core network.
At present the operator has already launched a limited 5G network around London, albeit mostly focused on their dedicated Mobile Broadband services (here). Since then Three UK claims that their initial customers are enjoying average speeds of 232Mbps, with peak speeds of 1.1Gbps (apparently up from 30Mbps they would have seen with their 4G devices).
Under the original plan the operator expected their 5G footprint to reach 25 UK towns and cities by the end of 2019, but despite this they’ve yet to launch the mobile environment side of their 5G network (Smartphones etc.) and the end of the year is only a little over one month away.
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In a statement the operator said that they “now have a number of towns and cities prepped to switch to 5G,” although they also noted that some of the components of that deployment are “more time consuming and complex than others, and, as a result, our 5G roll out is slightly behind our original plan.”
Three UK Statement on 5G Progress
There are a number of parts we need to put in place to deliver our 5G experience: 5G equipment on masts, the right backhaul transmission, as well as the need to acquire the right planning permissions from landlords. Added to this we also need to move all of our customer traffic onto the world’s first 5G cloud core network. Some of these components are more time consuming and complex than others, and, as a result, our 5G roll out is slightly behind our original plan.
Our absolute priority has always been to deliver the best 5G experience for our customers, and we’re confident our customers will enjoy a fast, seamless and uninterrupted experience as we roll out and align our 5G components. All new and existing Three customers with a 5G-enabled phone will have access to 5G with no speed caps, no data limits and at no extra cost on contract, SIM only and PAYG plans. We are stocking the Huawei Mate 20 X (5G), Samsung Note 10 Plus 5G, Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, Samsung A90 and the Xiaomi MiMix 5G.
4G enhancements
Three UK customers have already started to see the benefits of a £700 million upgrade to its 4G network which will deliver download speed improvements of up to 150% for customers.
More than 1,400 of our 4G sites have now been upgraded, on target for our goal of 1,860 by the end of the year.
Customers in cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and London are seeing speed improvements of 30-40%.
The expectation now is that Three UK won’t officially launch the mobile side of their 5G network until early 2020, although they’re not saying how long we’ll have to wait until the initially planned 25 towns and cities are live. The delay is somewhat embarrassing, particularly since all of their major rivals (EE, Vodafone and O2) have been able to launch full 5G services on time.
On top of that Three UK has done plenty of boasting about how they have roughly double the amount of 5G spectrum compared with their rivals (i.e. a 100MHz block of contiguous spectrum in the 3.4-3.8GHz band – here). Nevertheless that doesn’t matter much if your full network isn’t live or you can’t feed it with enough capacity to deliver the best speeds.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Tried three boardband and it wasn’t very impressive. Most I ever got was 200mbps and that was with me taking my router with a battery pack and sitting at a bus stop in line of site of a mast.
I return the 5g as not fit for purpose. I have a three 4g sim and in london it can have no data in some areas. At home I get about 30mbps. Main contact is vodafone and I get 90 to 100mbps at home and in Kings Cross station about 120mbps. Three are not really competing if I can’t get decent speeds for game streaming.
Please see 5G Apocalypse – the extinction event ‘ on youtube, an award- winning documentary exposing the dire health consequences of the 5G rollout. In it, Trump’s advisor, Tom Wheeler, openly admits to the press that this amounts to ‘untested, unprecedented amounts of radiation, but who cares? It’s jobs for Americans’. This is an international crime against humanity and we are the human guinea pigs that must watch this atrocity being inflicted on us, through our walls , 24/7, without even being consulted, because Big Tech wants to make a literal killing before we wake up to the consequences. Our children are super sensitive to this; their myelin sheathing is not developed until adulthood to protect their brains and their bone marrow is more absorbent of radiation. But No One, adult or child, will escape the effects of 5G as the masts will be placed every 250 metres across our towns and there will be hundreds of satellites beaming information and radiation down from space to saturate an unsuspecting humanity, caught up in the excitement of faster downloads and video games.
I feel like an idiot for even thinking of moving to them. Constant 1 bar signal and fighting for my data packets to reach back to me. There cheap for a reason and their network is overloaded with poorer people so it means slower speeds as it is.