5G Mobile Broadband is Expanding in the UK

5G network is slowly but surely coming to every major city in the UK. Vodafone, O2, EE and Three are expanding its network right across the country and offering customers some amazing speeds compare to 4G. 5G is now available in 17 towns and cities on at least one mobile network. O2 are the last contenders to the market with their launch only happening this month, October 2019. Nonetheless they are offering 5G at the same price as 4G. The chief executive of Telefonica UK, which owns O2, Mark Evans said “We're launching with a range of tariffs that make it easy and fair for customers to access 5G, with flexible plans that cost no more than 4G. We're also switching on 5G in important parts of towns and cities first, places where it will benefit customers and businesses most.” This is obviously great news for customers.

The coverage for 5G in cities varies and Vodafone comes out on top with a coverage of 15 cities, EE covering 9 cities, O2 covering 6 cities and the Three network covering 1 city (London). Vodafone is the only network to support 5G in Plymouth, with EE and O2 plan coverage in 2020. No talks of when Three will have coverage.

5G is set to open a wide range of opportunities, from superfast broadband with no need for landline, 5G TVs and remote health care for patients. Imagine the NHS remotely monitoring the changes to a patient’s health. 5G will improve technology beyond what we think 10 years ago.

The major benefit of 5G is speed. Having the ability to download a full HD movie within seconds or streaming 4K movie without any buffering is perhaps a huge selling point. You will of course need a new phone that supports 5G. The iPhone doesn’t support the 5G network at the moment but there are a number of phones that do. The Oppo Reno 5G, OnePlus 7 Pro 5G, Huawei Mate 20 X 5G, Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and LG V50 ThinQ are some of the phones that are available and fully support 5G. There are some competitive 5G mobile phone deals available on the market. That’s the usually thing companies do to entice customers whenever there’s something new to the market. 

You can check to see if your city as coverage. BT offers a 5G checker for people to check availablity in their area.