2 
In defence of its pricey new 4G plans, EE’s released some statistics that make for interesting reading. Apparently the average user on Orange’s Panther £36 contract uses just 400MB, while unlimited customers on T-mobile’s Full Monty use on average just 1GB of data, and even the top 10 per cent only top out at 6GB.
OK, so the average unlimited customer only pulls down 1GB of data. I can see that, because when I’m not streaming music, that’s about what I use. But, and there’s quite a large ‘but’, 4G’s much faster speeds are an enabler. I’ll bet the reason people who suck down just 1GB, or even 6GB, on unlimited tariffs, only do so because 3G can only get you so far. With the speed of 4G, it’ll be a heck of a lot easier to stream that high-def clip, or download that entire album at a high bit-rate. Yes, you can limit yourself, artificially, but then what’s the point in going faster? You go 4G now, before the rest of the networks get a foot in next year, because you like being on the bleeding edge; pushing boundaries is your thing.
If you think about it, the average person that uses just 400MB a month, really isn’t going to benefit from 4G. There will undoubtedly be lots of downers to 4G — the LTE modems are going to suck battery faster than existing 3G radios; the network’s going to be patchy for a while, and the phones are more expensive in the first place — so why would a low-yield user like that actually go with 4G?
Don’t get me wrong, I can totally understand why EE priced its plans like it has. Hell, it has to make money; a mobile network isn’t a charity. But despite what EE says, that 500MB plan is next to useless for the types of people who are actually going to jump on the 4G bandwagon right now. It all just stinks of pricing its paltry lowest offering at £36 so that it can say “hey, look. 4G’s not that expensive from £36 and up”. Anyone who actually signs up for that £36-a-month plan is going to be seriously frustrated within days if they’re taking advantage of what 4G has to offer at all.
See-Through Solar Panels Are a Window To Wider Usage
Internet Explorer Desertion Continues as Usage Drops Below 50 Per Cent
Would Your iPhone's Siri Usage Increase Your Phone Bill?
Does a 4G contract come bundled with 3G allowance as well?
No, it’s one in the same.
Oh. I’m satisfied with 3G. Plus I’ve got unlimited. Noway I’m moving to 4G until it’s standardized.
Hi Sam, what EE have said isn’t 100% correct. The reason why people on orange only use 400mb is simply because they are capped at 500 mb, which is what most people normally have on orange. Even if they said 750mb, they can’t make that conclusion as that is only based on people who use under that cap. About t-mobile, the result isn’t 100% too as they can’t tether, which restricts the amount of data a user can use and lowers the average of data used. Now look at Three uk, the average is over 1gb and that was before they upgraded to hspa+ 42. .
They have also failed to consider that because their network is going to be 4g, people will be temped to watch full hd films and download files on the go. As you and I know that was impossible on their network until now.
Agreed.
Nope, even if you are using 3g it uses up your data allowance.
no, 500MB is not enough, even 2GB is not enough with 4G speed, the more you find how fast things goes, the more you will be using it, and hell will break loss!
500mb was enough for me on 3G, only because the signal was so bad I’d stop trying to stream whatever it was part way. 4G speeds would definitely mean I’d use more.
Tell you what EE, give a broad range of your users unlimited 4G, don’t tell them what they could do with it, but give them 6 months to settle into a new standard usage pattern based on the new capabilities and then measure their average usage. Don’t bullshit us by telling us everything we can do with 4G and expect us to only use £G levels of data.
Well that’s clear then. If you use just 400Mb, buy a cheaper phone and contract. Nobody needs 4G, because if that’s all you use you’d never use more if you got a massive freakin speed boost….. /sarcasm
My GF lives just outside of manchester – i was hoping she would be able to pick up 4G at her house as her internet is terrible. She pays for a 20mb line and wont ring up and kick off no matter how much i moan at her, even though they only give her around 0.1mb Far to slow to stream a video off youtube and the internet is faster teathered to my phone rather than the wifi. Was hoping we could watch films on her TV etc through 4G, but with no unlimited offerings that idea is dead.
If you’re actually getting 100kb from your line, something is badly wrong. I’d seriously consider plugging her router into the test socket under the removable plate on the master socket and seeing if speeds improve. If they do, then something in the house is interfering with the DSL signal.
Done all that. Apparently when it was 1st installed about 2 years ago before i was with her an “Engineer” came out to set up her router and said he needed to check something at the street cabinet and never came back. She only used the net on her blackberry for facebook (its a blackberry so it was slow anyway) and never really knew until i introduced her to LoveFilm…
Hehe. Sounds like it’s BT’s problem then, or whoever is responsible for the line. If she calls the ISP, she doesn’t have to give them any grief over the phone, just report it as a fault. They should run a line test, ask you for a few details and report it to BT if they still can’t trace the problem. They’ll probably ask you to go through the master socket procedure first though.
i know she just wont call them, she has forgotten on no less than 40 occassions.
Sounds like me, when someone’s trying to get me to do the washing…
Yes EE, that is my usage pattern on 3G. BUT as 4G is faster than MOST Wifi, I will replace my Wifi use with data use, therefore blowing your 400MB average out of the water.
mmm’kay?
I use over 10GB a month on my unlimited contract. I pay £36 on T-Mobile and have full HSDPA coverage everywhere I go pulling down about 2Mbps with 80ms ping. I will not be upgrading to 4G when I’m eligible for an upgrade and I doubt I will change my plan either.
what’s the contract name? im up for renewal
its called “The Full monty” Plan
2000 mins or unlimited (guess the hidden FUP will be 5000 mins), unlimited text[FUP 5000] and data unlimited to a point (sure they use constant traffic management on video streaming)
cheers leexgx, i’ll look into it
one last question, is it 18mth or 24? i usually tend to stick to 18mth contracts as new phones come out etc
its Sim only its £26/1m (or month 12 norm £5 cheaper but you have to ask the salesperson, as its norm not an option you can pick from online)
currently at the time of posting the £31 sim only is £21 that gets you unlimited mins any network(norm its 2000 mins for £26), i jump on it right now but i still have 9 months left on my orange contract,(my second phone is on giffgaff(O2) so do not really need it as it has unlimited data ish {1GB an hr and 3GB an DAY} so thats more then i norm need in a month)
or £36-£41 with phone 24 month (most phones free apart from an £££ feature phone like iphone or HTC one X)
other nice point on t-mobile as well is that they do not charge you for been an blackberry user (contract prices are the same BB user or not, you just gotta make sure you tell them you need to be on the BB plan)
Hey you should go on three uk, I pay 36 too and get the same as you but I can tether and I get DCM-hsdpa (42mb) which is being rolled out. I get 20 meg and 45 ping on iphone 5
Hi there, I tried Three’s One Plan back when I had my iPhone and it honestly was the worst deal I think I ever paid for, it sounds good in theory, but I had no signal anywhere. I stream radio constantly in the car (I’m a delivery driver & I can’t stand anything on FM) and it’s a pain in the ass waiting for buffering constantly. Coverage may be better where you live, but I think down here I’ll be sticking to an EE based network for the big corporate coverage offered
For those asking, I got my phone when T-Mobile was offering a truly unlimited plan on all contracts over £25
its DC-HSPA+ (42mb), not what you posted
whilst people use relatively small amounts now, 4g encourages users to stream music and video from the cloud, and as cloud usage becomes more popular the need for more data increases, companies are pushing cloud usage more and more, but without the data to back up the cloud, its a pointless task.
I for one am not a cloud fan, and will be one of the last die hards to use it for storing all my music etc.. on
great for uploading and sharing photos, but for me, i want all my stuff local,
I think we’re about to see pricing creep across all plans that include data (which is pretty much all of ‘em, right?). The 4G license acquisition was VERY costly and to compensate for a relatively slow take-up, I imagine they’ll find funds elsewhere across the network.
Someone said it could take 5 minutes to use up your 500Mb allocation using 4G/LTE. That’s why 3 is the only realistic option (we hope) for anyone looking to flex the muscles of this new fast standard.
I think people don’t use data because they’re terrified of the cap so they turn 3G off, besides you cannot go above your limit unless you want to pay for anyways, so the stats they have mean nothing.
As soon as I got my mum an iPad on Three and told her don’t worry about data she uses it all the time and leaves 3G on and uses a lot of data when in Scotland.
Agreed – I used to use data as sparingly as possible for the first half of the month just in case I needed it in the second half, to the point that when I was leaving my last network to move to an unlimited contract they claimed I only needed 250mb/month based on my monthly usage. Since signing up with Three in July my monthly usage has been 2gb, 19gb, 15gb and 7gb in addition ti wifi.
Instead of just looking at their own skewed statistics based on contract limits and significant penalty fees maybe they should have a month where everyone gets unlimited data and then see what the average is so they can form proper data limits.
on most networks you sure can go past your data imit your moile operator will bill you for that extra data used, with 4G you could easy rack up bills as if you was Roaming if you’re not careful
O2 contract they do what t-mobile do they just drop the speeds to GPRS speeds (PAYG is £2 a day on O2)
on t-mobile contract and PAYG (drops to GPRS speeds once you used up the 500mb per month, if you have a limited plan that is)
Three have AYCE and The one plan so no data charges (unless your on an limited plan)
My burning questions are – If the speeds are faster does that mean I am going to use more data? What if I continue to surf or view the same websites, RSS feeds, read email etc each month, which I tend to do. Does it not mean the pages will load quicker because they have downloaded quicker?, so will I actually be using more data than before?
what a question… how about looking at it this way – if you had two cars, a fast one and a slow one and alternated using them to drive the same route to work and back would one car have significantly higher mileage than the other?
I gotcha! The assumption is one will use more because you have more time now. Three’s £36 for all you can eat data (be it on 3G) is sounding a better deal for me.
The assumption is also that 4G makes streaming and downloading music and video on the move viable. These activites will quickly chew through any of EE’s data plan caps.
If you are only going to use it to browse email and basic websites you’ll probably find they load a second or 2 quicker on average unless they have a lot of advanced media content the average webpage is not big and will load quickly on 3G or 3.5G.
If you down plan downloading or streaming on the move 4G speeds have very small benefits considering the price increase stick with 3G is my advice.
Thats just bullshit for the lay people. 4g unfortunately is going to be expensive so people who are going to get it will not be your ordinary 400mb using customer. Its likely that 100% of the people on 4g will be those top 10% of their customers!
Also alot of orange data limits are 500mb so ofcourse most people will use 400mb so as not to go over!!!
This kind of thing makes me really angry, they are knowingly trying to dupe people here!
That’s a load of ol’ bull. I think the reason why people use so little is because of their “fair usage” policy and are maybe afraid to go over their “unlimited” package.
Does anyone remember when the iPhone 2G came out and you got unlimited data by default?
Then the 3G & G1… and you got unlimited data on O2 & T-Mobile PAYG
Then the 3GS… where you still got unlimited data… this is the point where they capped Android
Then the iPhone 4 where you got like 1GB a month?
I thought it was supposed to get better with time?
Basing how much 4G data I would use on my current usage of 3G is ludicrous EE. I don’t stream or download movies on the move because 3G can’t handle that. I use it for email and a bit of web browsing; when it works 3G is fine for that. Minimum data cap should be 50Gb a month.
However it’s also plain from your punitive pricing and comments on 50Gb a month download for a user would destroy performance on your network, that streaming on 4G will also not be viable and that your network couldn’t handle many users doing this.
So I ask myself why would I pay these ridiculous prices to open an email 1 second faster or load a web page 3 seconds quicker, (assuming I had coverage, 3G coverage is still patchy on my commute).
Fact’s your network cannot handle heavy data use by many users and still give good download speeds, hence punitive prices and micro data-caps. I’ll stick with 3G thanks. When my contract is up for renewal next Feb I’ll shop around other phone companies and either stick with 3G and probably change networks because I consider EE to be conning people here or go 4G if someone offers a good price and worthwhile data cap, until then not interested 4G is still the future but what you’re offering is not it.
4G plans should of started at 2GB then offer 5GB and 8GB plans as they have, 500Mb is like the stupid limit i have ever seen (fine if you have an blackberry)