November 2012
Featured in this insight: IT & telecommunications
Research into new 4G network reveals patchy coverage: Mobile coverage firm RootMetrics have conducted some field tests into EE's new 4G network, and has found that less than half of Manchester city centre is able to take advantage of the high internet speeds available. Outside of the city centre there was no 4G coverage, according to the tests.
According to research, only 40.2% of the designated test locations had access to the 4G network.
In the test locations that did have 4G coverage, users had access to download speeds as high as 17Mbps (megabits per second). In comparison, the compiled results showed that the average EE download speed was 7.6Mbps, however these results also included test areas where 4G was unavailable.
The next fastest competitor in the market, Vodafone, averaged less than half of that speed with 3.1Mbps in a previous test.
In terms of downloading songs, this means that EE's 4G network would take less than 15–25 seconds to completely download a song, whereas a typical 3G network would take approximately a minute.
Scaling down the figures, the tests also showed that 31% of areas were achieving download speeds of more than 10Mbps, whilst 9% achieved 6-10Mbps, 18% speeds of 3–6Mbps and 23% speeds of 1.5–3Mbps. The remaining 19% achieved speeds of less than 1.5Mbps, however this still compares favourably with EE's rivals.
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