Three UK Sees Average Mobile Data Use Per Customer Hit 15GB
Mobile operator Three UK has today revealed that the average 4G and 5G data usage (mobile broadband), per customer, per month on their network smashed the 15GB (GigaBytes) barrier for the first time in October 2020 – this is said to reflect a 50% increase in data usage since the start of 2020 (10 months).
On average, the operator claims that their customers use 3.5 times more mobile data than the industry average and they’re currently investing £2bn on a major network and IT upgrade programme to help fuel this for the future (largely to support deployment of 5G).
Speaking of 5G, Three UK added that they expect to have around 1,000 sites delivering ultrafast 5G mobile coverage by the end of 2020 and boasts of this achieving average speeds in excess of 200Mbps (here).
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Three’s Summary of Network Progress in 2020
In 2020, our network and IT teams have:
— Launched 5G on mobile in February in 68 locations before extending this to 154 towns and cities across more than 900 sites for mobile and home broadband. We expect to have around 1,000 sites delivering 5G coverage by the end of 2020.
— Doubled the number of sites with improved 4G technology to 4,000 with performance improvements of up to 150%.
— Selected Ericsson as the partner for our next stage of our 4G and 5G rollout.
— Overhauled our data centre network with 20 new state of the art data centres across the country so our customers can enjoy lag-busting latency.
— Signed backhaul agreements with a number of partners including SSE Enterprise Telecoms and Colt laying almost 30,000km of fibre, so our customers get the full benefit of the speeds 5G can offer.
— Launched our new IT systems technically with prepay the first product enabled for our customers.
— Launched the ability to pay for Apple services such as the App Store, iTunes and games via your Three bill.
— And finally, we are proud that throughout the pandemic, we supported Government by zero-rating key services and offering additional support to affected customers.
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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bugger
Before spending days in lockdown on WiFi, I’d use over 100GB a month!
Definitely seen improvement in their 4G network, one estate over the other side of my village now has inside signal since start of this year.
Band 20!
Just got myself a 5G phone last week. Impressive speeds also!
I was lucky to smash 5GB a month when I had a Three contract. Not good at all even when I moved about.
Seems anything but EE is rubbish for me – but EE is so dam expensive I don’t want to pay £37 a month for a 600GB limit! (which is what it is)
Vodafone is 6 times more but speeds around here are very very slow. I need an EE variant which is cheap and gives a decent amount of usage – 50GB would do it I think i will look around. £15 a month I think it is
Unfortunately EE are the “Harrods” of the Mobile Networks (with prices to match).
@Anna. Take a look at ToTheMoonMobile.com a new MVNO that uses EE’s networks.
Thanks!
£25 for 50GB is not good.. 1p mobile do that for E15 also on EE.. But thanks for the suggestion 🙂
Just had a look and compared to Smarty and Voxi they are way overpriced for what they are offering.
I wonder how people are using the mobile phones. I’m at home and my mobile usage is 200MB a month at most but WiFi usage was 13.6GB last month.
I used 600 GB on my 5G connection alone with H3G yesterday downloading all my games from Steam – I peaked at 397mbps.
Apparently Three have dropped their FUP from what Customer Service tell me…
My usage is around 4.6tb on 5G…..
Literally how
I use around 80GB of data per month
@James. GO JAMES!
@Sam. They never had a FUP. They said if U stream YouTube at 1080p all day for 30 days that’s 1TB. It was never a limit on any way.
hardly surprising. On 80/20 I can do 4.5TB over Sky. Fair play to you 🙂
Hitting 4.6tb a month is easy if your stream 4K netflix,Disney+ uploading youtube videos 4K…..downloading ps5 demos or games updates some games are around 100gb+ in size…
Cancelled my bt broadband and virgin broadband using 3 sim for home broadband
Do you have a day job? Honest question. Because when I’m not working, I’m streaming. Not everything is available in UHD, but a good amount is.
I still managed to top 1tb only 3 months out of 11 so far of this year. And mine is a household of 4. I really would like to know how you folks manage to chew through data like this, because I’d like to be topping those charts too
My past 6 months bills usage has been around July 2.1TB August 6.5TB September 1.3TB October 1.1TB November 3.7TB have to blame the kids downloading games and streaming 24 hours nonstop Netflix…..
Three 5G is very fast getting well over 400meg download and 65meg upload for 13 pounds is bargain much better paying virgin 40+ quid a month…..
You’ve must have had to but the 5G router separately. There is no way that three will give you a 5G router and unlimited data for £13.