4G Bid Results

Ofcom, the UK communications regulator has today announced the winners of the 4G auction that's been taking place over the last couple of months. There were five winners of the auction; Everything Everywhere (EE), Hutchinson 3G UK Ltd (Three), Niche Spectrum Ventures Ltd (BT), Telefonica UK (O2) and Vodafone.

Between the five bidders £2.3 billion was raised with Vodafone paying for the most bands at a cost of £790 million. This is only 2/3 of the £3.5 billion that the UK government was hoping to get from the bidding process. Everything Everywhere (EE) has struggled to attract users to their existing 4G services which they released a few months ago and the UK government are already makes plans for 5G services to come online in less than ten years time. Is this why the bids are so low?

The bidding breakdown is as follows:

Telefonica (O2) who have won the bid for some of the 800 MHz spectrum are obliged to provide coverage to 98% of the UK population by 2017.

Mobile companies are expected to release their services within the next six months which should create quite a bit of competition on both price and data allowances.

Are you planning on switching to 4G? Are you already on 4G? What do you think? Leave your comments below.

4G Bidders Announced

Ofcom have released the names of the seven companies that will be bidding for the 4G spectrum in the UK, the companies are Three, O2, Vodafone, EE, HKT, MLL, and BT. Bidding will take place in the new year with services expected to start in the spring.

4G Launches in the UK (finally)

Everything Everywhere (EE), the company that owns Orange and T-Mobile have today launched the UK's first 4G mobile service.

A selection of 11 cities: Cardiff, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Sheffield, Glasgow and Southampton with more cities coming online before Christmas.

The company's mobile tariffs start at £36/month on a 24 month contract, for this you get 500MB of data (which isn't much). For data hungry users there's a 8GB tariff which will set you back £56/month. All of their plans come with unlimited texts and calls which is pretty much standard across all networks now.

Unfortunately the UK's going to have to wait until probably mid-2013 before any other networks launch 4G. Lets hope 5G comes a bit sooner.

Do you have a new 4G contract with EE? What are you view? Comment below.

4G comes to the UK

Everything Everywhere, the company behind Orange and T-Mobile have announced that their 4G will finally be made available by Christmas across a number of cities in the UK with the rest of the country coming after.