Friday, February 14th, 2020 (12:02 am) - Score 69,186

After a delay Three UK (Hutchison 3G UK) has this morning announced the launch of their 5G mobile network for Smartphone users, which will be available across busy parts of 65 new locations from the end of this month. Previously they’d only been able to launch the network on their dedicated Mobile Broadband service.

Technically speaking Three UK’s 5G network began to go live in August last year, although its availability was initially restricted to central London and the only way to use it was via their dedicated unlimited Three Broadband service (£30 per month via 5G or £22 for 4G). Nevertheless the operator claimed that their initial customers were still enjoying average speeds of 232Mbps, with a peak of 1.1Gbps (apparently up from 30Mbps with 4G devices).

Under the original plan they expected their 5G footprint to reach 25 UK towns and cities by the end of 2019, but things didn’t go quite according to plan. Indeed they admitted in November 2019 that the work had been “more time consuming and complex than others, and, as a result, our 5G roll out is slightly behind our original plan” (here).

The delay was somewhat embarrassing but the good news is that their wider 5G mobile service – underpinned by one of the country’s first cloud core networks – will finally be going live across 65 new UK locations by the end of February 2020, which among other cities and towns includes big chunks of London, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Coventry and Nottingham (see full list below).

NOTE: One slight twist to today’s news is that their 5G Broadband service won’t be going live in the new locations, yet, despite being the first to launch.

Dave Dyson, CEO at Three, said: “Today we are celebrating what is possible through 5G with a showcase of our ultra-fast 5G capabilities marking the next step in our 5G journey. 5G is set to change the world for all of us and we can’t wait for our customers to start experiencing it.”

Three UK claims to have somewhat of an advantage over their rivals in that they can harness a total of about 140MHz (frequency) across several related radio spectrum bands. One of those includes a 100MHz block of contiguous spectrum in the 3.4-3.8GHz band (here), which is known to be the sweet spot for 5G.

By comparison their rivals only have smaller slices of the 3.4GHz band to use at launch, although this will start to change later this year when Ofcom auctions off more spectrum for use alongside the new network technology.

NOTE: At present At present Vodafone only has 50MHz of 5G spectrum, while EE and O2 each hold 40MHz in the 3.4GHz band.

In the meantime the operator claims they’re “set up to be the fastest 5G network in the country” and will “provide peak mobile speeds of up to 2x faster than other telco operators.” However at present such claims should be taken with a pinch of salt, not least because they’ve yet to be proven via independent testing and how much spectrum you have is only part of the challenge (i.e. you also need plenty of backhaul capacity and cells for coverage).

Likewise any testing of early networks that is performed won’t currently tell us much because there’s likely to be plenty of spare capacity being shared between very few users (most people don’t own a 5G Smartphone yet and so can’t benefit from such a network).

Otherwise all of Three’s new and existing customers will have access to 5G with “no speed caps and at no extra cost” on all contract, SIM only and PAYG mobile plans.