EE Expand 5G Standalone Mobile Network to 50 UK Towns and Cities
Broadband ISP and mobile operator EE (BT) has today announced the next batch of locations where their new 5G Standalone (SA) mobile network will be deployed and made it available to all new customers. By the end of March 2025, the new 5GSA network will be live and available to over 28 million people across 50 “major towns and cities” in the UK (over 40% of the population).
The majority of 5G mobile networks today are still Non-Standalone (NSA), which means they are partly reliant upon older and slower 4G infrastructure. But SA networks are pure end-to-end 5G that can deliver ultra-low latency times, greater energy efficiency, better speeds (particularly uploads), network slicing, improved support for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, support for Voice over New Radio (VoNR or Vo5G) and increased reliability and security etc.
In case anybody has forgotten, EE officially launched a range of new 5G SA supporting mobile plans across 15 major UK cities in September 2024 (here), including Bath, Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield. A month after that, they added another batch of 16 locations (here) and have continued to expand.
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Unlike some of their rivals, EE states that they only announce 5GSA availability once a location has “at least 95% outdoor coverage“, so customers upgrading to the new technology know they will receive a “reliable and consistent experience“. Some of the new places set to benefit from EE’s 5G standalone upgrades in the next few weeks include the following locations.
Latest Additions to EE’s 5GSA Network
Altrincham
Blackburn
Bridgend
Caerphilly
Corby
Cwmbran
Doncaster
Exeter
Huddersfield
Hyde
Middlesbrough
Milton Keynes
Port Talbot
Rotherham
Sale
Sunderland
Wakefield
Walkden
Wilmslow
However, 5G SA technology is still somewhat constrained by limited device support among end-users, which is required in order for end-users to be able to fully harness the new network. But this problem will typically resolve itself as consumers go through their usual upgrade cycles. The technology is also available on EE’s latest 5GEE Wi-Fi and 5GEE Home (Smart 5G Hub) devices.
Malcolm Cubitt, Director of Mobile at EE, said:
“5G standalone is giving many customers a better and more reliable mobile experience, especially in busy locations. As we rapidly expand our network footprint to cover more than 40 percent of the UK population, we are widening its accessibility so more people can benefit – especially those looking to harness the power of cutting-edge features on the newest smartphones.”
In support of their ongoing coverage rollout and wider smartphone ecosystem, from today, EE said they would also be making 5GSA available to “all new and upgrading customers taking any EE handset plan“, enabling more consumers to access this next-generation network experience.
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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How about EE make it available to all customers?
I know they think they are the universe’s best network but let’s be honest charging extra to make your phone work better is a disgrace.
Perhaps they should charge extra to improve their indoor coverage.
Remember that 4G was originally restricted to certain customers? In time they’ll make 5G SA available to everybody, because it’s more efficient for them.
There will be a long tail of people with older SIM cards (the cards need to have a SUPI on them, and be able to convert that to a SUCI on demand, which are things that didn’t exist 6 years ago), or with phones that have bugs handling 5G SA, that needs addressing – easier on EE support to roll it out in stages, starting with the high ARPU customers.
You can also use your time with the high ARPU customers to build up an FAQ for support to use to quickly diagnose known issues (e.g. “if you enable 5G SA, people with a FooBar phone OS version 12.34 or earlier lose network completely, even in regions without 5G signal – fixes are update over WiFi to 12.35 or later, or turn off 5G SA for 24 hours so they can update over the air”.
Eventually, though, I’d expect everyone to have 5G SA enabled, just as they used to only enable 4G for “premium” plans, and now enable it for everyone.
Marketing. 5G SA actually helps networks manage bandwidth and capacity, but they spin it as a win for consumers much like with any new technology.
You may want to read the end of the article. From today EE are making 5G Standalone available to New or Upgrading Customers on Handset plans. So as and when people renew their deals, they will have 5G SA access at no extra cost.
Unsure what this means for SIM Only, or if that was just an omission, but again it is likely just a staggered launch.
The original gatekeeping of this is probably, as mentioned, to have a sample of customers test the network first before being expanded to all customers.
They better get a move on then, they claimed Swansea would be done before end of March 2025 and as of today that isn’t the case
Is it merely a case of flicking a switch? If not and more work is involved they’ll miss this deadline
I did ask over on their official forums but it appears they too have outsourced customer services to India and the people don’t even know what 5G standalone is
Since the point of 5G Standalone is to not rely on any legacy components so be new end to end it follows that every component is a new build of physical equipment. Presumably that requires commissioning tests to assure that it’s all working before it goes live. So that last step to go into service is a software switch of the network operators own choice. You’d hope that the network project manager has a little slack in his schedule for the unforseen events but otherwise go live follows test success.
@Lonpfrb
It’s a bit more complicated than that – NR NSA and NR SA share the Radio Access Network (RAN) components, but where NSA carries traffic on the 4G Evolved Packet Core (EPC), SA carries it on the 5G Core (5GC).
Thus, when they switch on SA in an area, they’re using the same hardware as they used for NSA, because the RAN is the same, but they’re configuring a new setup on the routers to allow SA traffic to go down the 5GC, rather than having it go onto the EPC. It’s all software configuration on the existing hardware, not new hardware (unless they’re also fixing other issues in the network – like upgrading the backhaul from a site to support higher speeds).
That said, the software configuration isn’t trivial to get right; there’s a bunch of stuff (that I don’t fully understand) around mobility management to tune, so that devices don’t desperately try to stay attached to NR SA when it’d be more efficient (in terms of battery use and airtime consumed) to switch to a LTE cell and use NR NSA whenever data is in active use rather than jumping between marginal NR SA cells all the time.
It should be possible to do all of the changes remotely (even a WFH network engineer can do them), but you’ll then want to monitor the result of enabling NR SA and tune the mobility parameters based on real use rather than computer modelling. As a result, you don’t want to just “flick the switch” in all areas where computer modelling shows it’ll work, because then you’re giving your networks team a huge lump of work to do fixing up all the places where the computer model is wrong.
Instead, turn on in stages, fix the mobility parameters where reality and the computer model disagree, put in more NR cell sites where you find that reality disagrees because the RAN isn’t actually providing usable signal in an area where the computer model says it “should”, and generally make sure that people who switch from LTE + NR NSA to NR SA don’t see a worse experience as a result.
After all, T-Mobile USA is still dealing with the fallout from their NR SA launch 5 years ago, where they turned it on in areas where they had just n71 coverage on NR, while having good B4, B12 and B66 coverage on LTE. This meant that non-technical customers discovered that “5G Off” got them better speeds, and now T-Mobile has to slowly get through to those customers that they’d be better off with 5G enabled, since T-Mobile has now fixed things so that you always get better performance with 5G enabled than you do on LTE (by pushing you over to NR NSA + LTE where that would boost performance, and by improving NR coverage).
I’m currently tethered to an iD mobile wi fi hot spot as I can’t get a useable signal at work on EE. According to EE own signal checker I should get a great 4G signal inside & good 5G signal outside.
All EE technical support could do when I complained was say there’s nothing wrong with the signal in that area & would I like to buy a new phone? No thanks as my phone works perfectly fine elsewhere so it’s not a device problem is it.
A new phone could fix it of your phone can’t use all EE’s frequencies, some of which will penetrate buildings better.
EE avoids using low bands for different reasons (limited capacity for data and they have less low band spectrum than Vodafone and O2). This makes them a good network for data speeds, but they tend to be worse indoors where the higher frequencies can’t reach.
If they don’t work well for you, then move on to a different network. Buying a new network or wasting your time talking to support is unlikely to fix anything.
Kind of pointless with a fair use policy 600 GB a month
That comes down to if you just use it on your handset or use it for other devices, for a mobile at mobile screen resolution, you’d need to be watching a LOT of exceed the FUP.
Preston has it as well on a few sites.
So….these 5G SA….only work in the above areas
What if I have one of these plans and i move out of the area for a few hours…..will i not be able to use phone ?
Goes to 5G or 4G.
Your phone will still work, albeit on a 4G or 5G NSA network much like how phones used to drop from 4G, to 3G.
You would use 4G or 5GNSA
These plans give you access to 5G SA. They don’t remove access to 5G NSA, 4G or 2G… so as long they have signal of some kind, your phone will continue to work like before.
Your phone will automatically drop down to either 5G NSA or 4G LTE when you leave any 5G SA areas, its a seamless switch.
EEs checker says 5G SA is live in Skelmersdale but I must admit since renewing on Full Works SIM only just a couple of days ago, my phone still reports 5G non standalone.