EE 4G review

The UK finally has a 4G mobile network, or rather 11 cities in the UK have their own 4G networks with great swathes uncovered land between them. If you’re one of the lucky urbanites to receive coverage then you might have been wowed at talk of speeds that rival fast home broadband connections. However, before rushing to sign up there are a few things you should consider, both practical hurdles like new hardware and a pricey new contract, as well as some guidance on what 4G is good for, and what it’s not.

THE PRACTICAL BIT

The new 4G network is run by a new company, once called Everything Everywhere it’s now simply know as EE. EE is owned by the same people that run the T-Mobile and Orange networks. At present it’s the only 4G network available, as it uses the current 1800MHz band. Rivals will have to bid for space on the new 850MHz and 2.1GHz bands in Spring 2013 before launching their competing services.

EE is only 4G player in town at present, and it’s only in the biggest towns as well

The UK’s first 4G network uses a technology called Long Term Evolution, more commonly known as LTE. To make use of the new network you’ll need a handset that supports this standard. The only one in wide circulation today is the new iPhone 5, if you have any other phone then you’ll need to upgrade to receive 4G – which will likely put off anyone who’s bought, or signed up for, a shiny new Android handset in recent months. We tested the service with the Huawei Ascend P1 LTE, but it’s also available on a special LTE version of the Samsung S3, as well as on the Windows Phone 8-powered Nokia Lumia 920. Now that’s a pretty impressive line-up of hardware, so you shouldn’t have to worry about compromising your handset to get 4G. 4G is also available for other devices, such as laptops, via a Huawei Mobile Wi-Fi hub or USB dongle.

We used a Huawei Ascend to initially test the EE service

If you have an iPhone 5 sim-free, and you aren’t currently tied into a contract or are with Orange or T-Mobile, then switching to EE is straightforward – just call them up and port your number over to a new contract. It’s worth noting that the current iPhone won’t work with upcoming rival services on other bands, though competition may lower prices of course. In almost any other case, you’ll need to take out a new 2-year contract with EE, we’ve reviewed a number of the devices above, but choosing a tariff is a little trickier.

TARIFFS AND PRICES

The good news is that all the EE smartphone tariffs come with unlimited calls and text messages, the bad news is that none of them come with unlimited data. This is a real shame, as those who want high-speed data are also likely to want lots of it, but EE are offering data caps up to 8GB which should satisfy even the heaviest users – unless you were thinking of replacing your home broadband connection entirely.

Tarriffs start at £36 per month for just 500MB of data, though we doubt that will satisfy many people interested in 4G. The 1GB plan is £41 per month, 3GB for £46 per month, 5GB for £51 per month and 8GB for £56 per month. If you’re currently on an unlimited tariff then best check you handset (Settings/Data Usage on Android) or your bill to see how much data you use at present.

Wi-Fi hubs and dongles are available with data caps up to 5GB on 18-month contracts. 2GB costs £16, 3GB is £21 and 5GB is £26. You can use bandwidth monitor from www.bwmonitor.com to measure your data usage.

These tariffs certainly aren’t cheap, but they don’t work out much more expensive than getting the identical 4G-ready handset on 3G sister-network Orange. Shop around however for the cheapest 3G equivalent and you can get a 3G Samsung Galaxy S3 on Vodafone with unlimited calls and texts plus 1GB of data for £29 – that’s £12 less a month than EE. So you’re certainly paying a hefty premium for some combination of the 4G hardware and contract.

There are a number of sweeteners with EE contracts to try and help the medicine go down. The most tempting is the free movie download you get every week from now till February.

EE is offering free movie downloads until February

If the extra cost doesn’t put you off, then mobile data is probably very important to you. The big question then is whether you’ll use more data once you’ve got a faster connection, and that’s a very tricky one answer. First let’s look at just how fast a connection you can expect from the new service.

HOW FAST AND HOW MUCH

We tested the service around London, mainly in the centre of town plus various places in South-east London. At our desk we saw speeds of up to 40Mbit/s download and 12Mbit/s upload. More commonly, averaging results across numerous tests we found the service provided around 20Mbit/s download and around 6Mbit/s upload. That’s many times faster than 3G HSDPA offers, where we often saw uploads and downloads of around 1Mbit/s. We will have other test handsets over the next three weeks and different members of staff will be adding to this review based on their – admittedly London-centric – findings. Coverage was good, with a 4G signal available almost everywhere we went. It wasn’t consistent though on public transport, with numerous drop-outs as we commuted into the centre of town by train.

EE is offering free movie downloads until February

Some have argued that with so much extra speed, the amount of data we use will spike instantly. We think that’s a bit simplistic, and believe it’s more likely to grow with time as services start to take account of these faster mobile speeds. For example, at present the BBC’s mobile iPlayer app on Android only offers pitifully poor quality video, even in its highest-quality setting. We presume this is so no one runs up a huge bill using it and then blames the BBC, but to anyone with a 4G handset it’s just frustrating. The same applies to YouTube, even in HQ, though to a lesser extent. Netflix subscribers meanwhile can enjoy a high-quality mobile stream, but the data overheads are huge, see usage below.

Once things are moving onscreen, the BBC’s iPlayer mobile app simply falls apart in quality terms, but higher-quality video will eat up data quickly

That said, we did find ourselves watching more video on the go with the handset, largely because it was an obvious test scenario, rather than because we really wanted to. It was quite enjoyable to watch a programme while waiting for someone in the pub, but try to use it on public transport was very patchy with the signal cutting in and out and breaking up the stream intermittently for up to a minute at a time. The same went for audio streaming, it’s not the amount of data that’s the issue but rather maintaining a constant connection while moving.

We find it takes a lot longer to read a webpage than download it, and so you shouldn’t use much more data when browsing. You will be able to upload pictures much faster, but smartphones are very good at doing these kinds of tasks in the background anyway, so unless you’re a serious fiend at uploading pics to Facebook we doubt you’d upload more just because its quicker to do so. One place we can see 4G being useful is in uploading video clips on the go, which was so slow before as to be almost pointless.

Another good use for 4G is for those working on the go, who need to open, work on and save large documents in the cloud. A 4G dongle would make your life considerably better, and for work it’s far easier to justify the cost – whether that’s buying a dongle or tethering a laptop to a smartphone – which is permitted under all contracts.

OUR USAGE

In the first five days we’ve been testing the handset we ran up a total of 1.55GB of usage, around double what we usually use in a month, but then this wasn’t really normal use as we were testing the device. Now 830MB of that was a move bought from EE, which doesn’t count towards data use. We also managed to rack up 453MB of BBC iPlayer use, but three-quarters of that was for the battery use testing. Amazingly, Netflix used 79MB of data within less than a minute, as we checked the quality of its mobile app, so maybe high-quality streaming video isn’t such a great idea.

It was pretty impossible to simultaneously test the service and get an idea of how much data we’d typically use on it

We’ll continue to update this section as we use EE more.

CONCLUSION

It’s really hard to say whether people should get 4G with EE, as it’s so subjective based on your data use, how much you pay for a contract at present, where you live and what you do day-to-day. As technology journalists, for example, you’d think we’d be keen, but with fast Wi-Fi at home and at the office, and a short commute in-between we wonder if it’s worth even us rushing into. That said, 4G is the future and this is a question of when, not if.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to upload a lot of photos or video on the go then 4G is definitely for you, and if you regularly find yourself sitting in public places (which don’t offer free Wi-Fi) waiting for people then it should be just the thing. Especially if you subscribe to services such as Sky Sports or Netflix. However, at present we don’t think most people should be rushing out to upgrade to a 4G phone.

That said, if your contract is at an end, and you have to make a decision now, plus you’re looking at signing up for two years for a top-end handset anyway, then EE is well worth considering. Once the other networks weigh in early next year we’ll start to see more apps make better use of that extra bandwidth.