EE Extend 5G Mobile Broadband Cover to 14 New UK Areas

Mobile operator EE (BT) has today announced the next phase of its effort to rollout their ultrafast 5G based network across the United Kingdom, which among other changes, will extend its network across 14 further towns and cities. Interestingly, they’re also deploying the existing 2100MHz band for 5G in 14 different locations.

At present, EE’s 5G network already covers over 50% of the UK population (here), although until now this has mostly been done by harnessing mobile bands in the 3.4-4GHz and 700MHz range. But the operator’s plan to retire older 3G network services by the end of 2023 – currently representing just 2% of data traffic over their network – will free up more spectrum for 5G.

One such popular band is 2100MHz, where the operator already holds a 20MHz slice of spectrum frequency between 2149.7MHz to 2169.7MHz, which can now be re-farmed for use by 5G based mobile broadband connectivity. EE will also gain the ability to combine this band with their existing spectrum holdings (e.g. carrier aggregation), which could further boost data speeds and coverage.

The announcement states that 14 existing 5G deployment locations have been turned on to harness the 2100MHz band. On top of that, the operator has also switched-on 5G in 14 completely new locations today. We’ve listed all of these below.

The First 14 UK Locations Using 2100MHz for 5G

London
Manchester
Liverpool
Bristol
Leeds
Cardiff
Belfast
Newport
Perth
Kilmarnock
Eastbourne
Scunthorpe
Chesterfield
Wellingborough

The 14 New UK 5G Deployment Locations

Bradford
Kidderminster
Peterborough
Bedford
Luton
Southampton
Newport
Dewsbury
Sutton in Ashfield
Newcastle-under-Lyme
Hemel Hempstead
East Kilbride
Bridgend
Carlisle

We should point out that, unlike other operators, EE usually only announces places as being live if they have a minimum population of 10,000 people, within which they must also be delivering 5G coverage to “at least a third of that local population as well as the centre of the location.” By comparison, we’ve seen other operators announce locations despite only having the tiniest of coverage available.

Christian Thrane, MD of EE Consumer Marketing, said:

“To provide customers with the best smartphone experience, we are continually upgrading and expanding our 5G network. By increasing capacity, our customers will get faster speeds and an even more reliable experience. When combined with the enhanced benefits and services our great new pay monthly packages offer – then for those planning to get a new 5G smartphone, the message is simple: there’s only one UK network that offers the best smartphone experience.”

The announcement is extremely welcome news, particularly since most mobile operators tend to become somewhat coy with such details once the rollout of a new network technology has been going for a couple of years or more.

On the other hand, EE has not said how much of a coverage impact today’s announcement will have – either in terms of 5G population or geographic coverage, but their aim is still to provide a 5G “signal to over 90% of UK landmass” by 2028 (here).

The operator actually said they’d reach “across the entire UK” by 2028, but this is still open to debate, as the talk is still of tackling that final 10% with some as yet largely undefined on-demand solutions. But we suspect that LEO based satellites, which can transmit mobile signals directly to regular Smartphones, may well form part of this.

Finally, Vodafone, Three UK and O2 (VMO2) have similar plans for re-farming their own 3G spectrum to be used by 5G.