EE 4G Comes To 12 More UK Towns And Cities

EE 4G has expanded to 12 new towns and cities, bringing the total number to 62 and total coverage to 50 percent of the UK population.

Aylesbury, Berkhamsted, Billericay, Blackpool, Brentwood, Dewsbury, Huddersfield, Lytham St Annes, Marlow, Pontefract, Thame and Windsor are the lucky locations, while EE 4G has promised to add 18 more by the end of June and cover 70 percent of the country by the end of the year.

EE is the UK’s only current 4G operator, having been granted permission by Ofcom to launch an LTE service on its existing spectrum last October. It currently has 318,000 EE 4G subscribers and plans to reach one million by the end of 2013.

EE 4G rollout

That ambition is likely to be challenged by rival services from O2, Vodafone and Three, who all won bandwidth in the recent Ofcom 4G spectrum auction, but EE remains confident its offering will keep it in pole position.

“Our rollout of the country’s first 4G mobile network is continuing at a great pace to ensure that we are connecting people right across the UK to one of the fastest mobile networks in the world, as quickly as possible,” said Olaf Swantee, chief executive officer, EE.

“We’re committed to rolling out 4G to 98 percent of the population by the end of 2014, and that includes the double-speed 4G that will launch this summer.”

EE has announced it will double the amount of 1800MHz bandwidth dedicated to 4G from 10MHz to 20MHz, enabling top speeds of 130Mbps in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield, while it will also stock the UK’s first ‘CAT4’ 4G device, the Huawei E5576 Mobile Wi-Fi, to allow users to take advantages of these speeds.

It has also announced plans to rollout 4G in rural Cumbria and has pledged to improve the digital skills of one million people, take on 500 apprentices by 2015 and reduce its carbon emissions and waste landfill by 2015.

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