EE Become First UK Mobile Operator to Hit 50 Percent 5G Cover

EE (BT) today claims to have become the first mobile operator to have expanded its ultrafast 5G (mobile broadband) network to cover more than 50% of the UK’s population, which it added had been achieved “five years ahead of government’s ambition” – despite the challenge of needing to replace Huawei as a key supplier.

On the one hand, this is great news and EE deserves plenty of credit for having achieved the feat. But on the other hand, it wasn’t so many years ago that they were pushing the wider market to get “Clear on Coverage” (here) by making geographic coverage the default industry standard measurement (population coverage has always been a fairly low bar, due to the disproportionate impact of dense urban cities and towns).

Besting the government’s own target for 5G mobile coverage, while good, does also overlook the fact that politicians have never been particularly ambitions in this regard. Back in 2017 the Conservative Party’s manifesto actually promised “to have the majority of the population covered by a 5G signal by 2027,” but as we know the word ‘majority’ can easily be conflated to reflect anything over 50%.

People only needed to look at how quickly 4G achieved a similar level of coverage in order to understand that reaching 50%+ by the end of 2027 – through commercial investment alone – was always likely to be a fairly easy target to hit. The big irony is that the Government’s newly unveiled Levelling Up White Paper has already – perhaps somewhat comically – downgraded even this target to be met by 2030!

None of this is EE’s fault, of course, but we do wish that the Government could have been a bit more ambitions when setting their original targets for 5G.

Julia Lopez, Digital Infrastructure Minister, said:

“I am delighted to see EE has made good progress rolling out 5G to half of the country. The technology, which can be up to 20 times faster than 4G, will help us in our aims to level up our economy and unleash the potential of communities across the UK.

We are working alongside industry to boost rural coverage through a £1 billion deal with mobile phone operators and are developing a new strategy to boost further investment in 5G and help operators rapidly expand their networks.”

Marc Allera, CEO of BT’s Consumer Division, said:

“Today’s milestone is a huge achievement in our 5G journey. EE was the first network to launch 5G in the UK and now we’re the first mobile network operator to take the technology to 50% of the UK population. Our ambitions for 5G don’t stop here. We’ll continue to invest in our network to provide our customers with unrivalled connectivity.”

Interestingly, EE appears to have actually beaten their own 5G coverage target today too. Last year the operator stated that they expected their UK 5G coverage to reach “over half the population by early 2023” (here), before eventually reaching their ambition to deliver 5G connectivity solutions anywhere in the UK by 2028 – through a combination of permanent coverage (90% of the UK’s landmass) and on-demand solutions.

We’d argue that EE’s future target for 90% coverage of the UK’s landmass by 5G is a much more significant and harder goal to achieve than anything using the wishy-washy realm of “population” figures.