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EE’s got its test network up and running and is in the process of gearing up for a nationwide launch in the very near future. We took the time to pop down and have a hands-on play with an iPhone 5 hooked onto EE’s 4G LTE network. Here’s what 4G’s really going to be like, once you get it in your hands.
Surprise! LTE is miles faster than 3G. In our testing with the iPhone 5 in the centre of London, we easily clocked up download speeds of 10-40Mbps with uploads in the 14Mbps realm on the iPhone 5. Now, that’s not quite the same blazing speeds we saw on O2′s test network with 4G dongles, but that’s to a phone, not a computer. If EE’s shiny new 4G network manages real-world speeds in the region of 30Mbps, we’ll all be very pleased indeed. That’s faster than quite a lot of people’s home broadband.
One of the biggest benefits of LTE over existing 3G and 3.5G networking technologies are the vastly reduced ping times. By that I mean the click-to-bang times — how long it takes to respond to your command. There are many reasons for that, not least the number of technical hurdles to jump over between your 3G phone and the outside world, which have simply been removed in the 4G specifications of LTE.
On the street, that means there’ll be less waiting for that initial burst of action. Yes the download speeds mean you’ll actually grab things faster, but ping times in the 50ms range, which is what we managed in testing, will reduce the perceived waiting time by quite a bit. Your average 3G ping time is in excess of 100ms, which means EE’s 4G network should cut that in half.
In talking to those using the 4G-equipped variants of 3G phone as their main device, using LTE made a small dent in the battery life of the phone. That’s not really a surprise, but perhaps the interesting thing is that it didn’t make quite as much difference as you might expect. Approximate figures might be a 10 per cent increase in battery drain, which isn’t bad at all. Frankly, that’s because we’re late to the 4G game here in the UK. LTE-packing devices, with 4G chipsets are pretty mature, which means none of the bleeding edge, barely-out-of-beta devices that you might have experienced when 3G first arrived. I guess that’s about the only benefit of the UK being so late to the 4G game.
4G on your phone isn’t quite going to be revolutionary, but it will bring with it the convenience and performance of fibre broadband while on the go, and that’s pretty damn awesome. No waiting for videos to load, or web pages, or twitter streams for that matter. In fact, we’re probably at the stage where the speed of the device is now the limiting factor, not your connection speed. It’s a good job those LTE-packing devices boast beastly processing specs too.
It’s worth noting that where EE’s installed 4G equipment and boosted the backhaul to the masts that handle it, the 3G network broadcast by the same masts has gotten a big upgrade too as a side effect. That meant that where we were testing EE’s LTE network, the EE 3G network showed great download speeds and low ping times. So, whether you’re looking at getting a new 4G phone or not, anyone on EE’s network is going to see improved speeds and performance on 3G without having to do anything. Everyone wins.
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Video is private, guys
You can blame YouTube and embargo times. It wouldn’t let us set it to any other than on-the-hour or half-hour times. I’m impressed you’re still on the site come 12-midnight
Only weirdos look at giz past midnight… What? I still have 6 mins left!
Looks like a good video, shame its set to private!
“This video is private.”
“Everyone wins”
Yes – if you live in one of the area’s getting it. If not (like me), you lose. Bearing in mind that bt broadband speed is still less than 512kb (in Medway so not out in the sticks), I can’t see us getting these speeds any time soon either.
Biased headline….
No mention of the Samsung Galaxy SIII in the video that appears to have faster download speeds than the iShitephone 5….
It’s just a phone, chill out.
Thats very mature of you…
You shite phones? Stop eating them then.
That’s because speedtest is server specific.
That said however I had far worse reception on my old iPhone 4 than my GS2 so the handest has to come into play too and how you’re holding it.
I get 7.6Mbps download on 3G with Three. Looks like I’m not missing out *too much*
I think that must be because you are the only person using that network.
I got similar speeds when I was with Three (not everywhere of course) but I ditched them because their signal on my commute was sub par.
All the bandwidth hogs have jumped on to Three because they have cheap and reasonably unlimited data.
Guilty as charged, but I’m only getting 0.5Mb on the one speedtest i’ve done, liking the sound of 7Mb and 20Mb though… hopefully that’ll kick in somewhere handy for me one day.
I got over 20Mb recently. Here is one I recorded at 19Mb:
yfrog.com/oca24wpj
Someone remind my why we need LTE again?
Yup.Same here on 3 network. I tether my unlimited 3G internet sometimes when I frustrated with my home broadband. It works like a charm with great speed, sometimes faster than my Sky Broadband. I really do not need 4G when I can get unlimited 3G that can stream everything.
Well I have 100Mbps fibre for my home broadband, but that’s another story…
Wait for the real world (100′s of people trying to access the same mast) data and retry.
Reckon the data speed will change slightly.
Yeah it will be interesting to see the reliability of the network then too, not just how much the speed drops..
Exactly.
I am in a mediocre signal at work, and get 3.3 megabit down, 1.3 megabit up on my H+ mobile connection via my GS3.
Now, I’m actually perfectly content with 3.3 down and 1.3 up, seeing as I have a monthly limit – it’s not like I can stream movies on the go anyway.
But my speeds are down there instead of higher up because there are too many people on 3G. These 4G speeds being reported here are because no fucker is using the thing!
Which begs the question – in time, when everyone is on 4G, maybe it’ll be better to be on 3G – less contention and less power consumption
Wouldn’t the back end system for 3G and 4G be the same anyway though? That’s surely going to be where the contention comes from for the most part.
Also by the same logic shouldn’t 2G be quicker than 3G because fewer people are using it?
Well, not by that logic, because the theoretical maximum for 2G was 150 kbits/s (or 350kbits/s for EDGE?) whereas the theoretical max for 3G (or rather HSPA+ which I think most phones support) is like 168 megabits/sec or something massive.
So, I’m imagining that the speed for us is limited by available bandwidth in the air, not the back end system.
So that’s what I’ve based my speculation on
fair do’s I’m no expert by any means
Don’t suppose they told you when we can buy it?
I’m afraid not. You can buy the handsets right now, but not the 4G service. I really tried too. “A few weeks” is all I could get out of them.
Just noticed the time of Sam’s review, and that BBC put up a video at just past midnight too. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19805535
NDA lifted or something?
Seems like the obvious answer, though I don’t see the point, they have already done reviews of the iPhone 5 and speedtests on EE’s network, so what’s left to keep secret?
Spot on.
Sam, do 4G phones allow you to connect to 3G, or is it 4G or nothing? Can you take a 4G iPhone 5 or Galaxy S3 around Europe and the States?
(I’m not quite sure how I don’t know this already)
4G operates just like 3G before it, when there’s no LTE your phone drops back to 3G or 2G. And yes and no on the roaming front on LTE. Europe, yes, the Americas, maybe. It depends on what frequencies the phone supports. It’s a bit like the “quad-band” 3G phones that were needed to roam in other countries, but we’re not there yet with LTE chipsets to be able to call them “world phones”.
What is the name of that tune? It’s very catchy.
Shazam says it is Free & Easy by Philip Guyler & John Stax
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McH90627-ps
just a question how many here think they need the speeds of 4G as opposed to those who want?
and what would you use these speeds for?
The thing is, LTE should support speeds in the 10-30Mbps range, and low pings, even in crappy signal. 3G on the other hand suffers badly. So, in theory (and we won’t know for sure until we’re all on the network), LTE should give more stable data rates and user experience.
i think that for an extra fee, a lot of people wont take it, as i use just maps apps and occasional googling when away from wifi, and find current speeds fine for that,
so if its free then yes, when i get a 4g phone then great but at a cost, i cant see it being viable for a lot of people.
heavy users i guess will benefit most
It certainly won’t be free, at least not for a couple of years. I suspect it’ll be pretty pricy on launch, sadly.
Is ping that important in real world usage other than in gaming? Surely it’s throughput that’s the important thing – if you can get 30Mb through in a second does it matter if the transmission delay is 10 or 100ms?
Yes, because it’s the perceived wait time. If you’ve got a really long ping time, then you have to wait longer for things to actually start happening. It doesn’t make any difference to overall download speed for large files, but most of what people do, browsing and whatnot, is actually more reliant on low pings once you get over a certain threshold of download speed (5Mbp+ probably).
Hmmm I’d rather go with the Galaxy S3 LTE which is now available on T-mobile and Orange
We should have a nice raft of LTE phones coming in soon, but I agree that LTE variant of the GS3 looks mighty nice.
It does look nice and comes with JellyBean pre installed… I don’t know whether or not to go for it or wait fore the Note 2.
Tmobile said to me that they expect it to go on sale with them next month but that could just be talk… It is really hard to find the Grey one in the UK!
This is awesome. I live around the Birmingham area and have noticed a pretty beefy improvement to 3G speeds and this is the first I’ve read about 3G being affected by the 4G upgrade stuff.
Still, I wonder how much UK carriers are charging for 4G.
It’ll cost you ten thousand guinea’s and no less.
Do you reckon this test accounts for congestion? If congestion and bandwidth caps/allocations are considered, we should be looking at a mere 10Mbps range speeds.
Also, If 4G is expensive, it beats it’s own purpose. We need greater speeds to do more data intensive tasks. If we are given all the speed, but are constrainted by cost and data caps, what’s the point in having that speed.
Now that, sir, is a good question. It’ll all hinge on price. But trust me, you’ll notice the speed difference while out and about with LTE. Whether that’ll actually be worth the extra cost, we’ll see.