Tag: networks

Huawei add the P9 Lite to their portfolio

As you can see in the review we are pretty big fans of the Huawei P9. It now seems that Huawei is going to be making a bigger push into the UK market than we first thought. Coming very soon to a network near you is the P9 …

BT investing £6bn in faster broadband

Following on from a reported 15% rise in annual profits to £3.03bn, BT has announced plans to invest £6bn in faster broadband and mobile services over the next three years. The company plans to offer their “ultrafast” broadband to 12 million premises by 2020. With speeds of 300 …

Tesco Mobile offering free roaming in lots of European countries

If you’re planning to use your mobile phone across Europe then, until now, Three has been your best bet. Their “Feel At Home” offering let’s you use your phone as you would in the UK, but across European destinations such as France, the Republic of Ireland, Sweden, Spain, …

EE top Ookla speed tests

If you’ve ever wanted to completely destroy your data allowance and find out how fast your mobile network is, you could download the Ookla Speedtest or browse to Speedtest.net. It will, if you do it enough, give you a rough idea of just how quick your connection is. …

Three saves customers £1.3 billion

If you’ve been abroad lately you’ll probably have that text message arrive when you land… Calls will cost a crazy amount here, texts will be just about bearable, but please don’t even think about using data unless you want to re-mortgage your house. Sure, some networks are doing …

giffgaff 4G vs 3G tested. Is there really a huge difference?

Every network is pushing 4G at the moment, even the MVNOs – those networks that use the likes of O2, Vodafone, Three and EE as the back-end infrastructure but supply their own service on top. giffgaff is probably one of the most well-known, mainly due to their community …

Rail Travel. There’s still some challenges.

As promised, I’m writing all the Coolsmartphone content this weekend on my phone. It’s part of #acerliveblog2014. There’s a number of challenges facing rail commuters still, even in our modern world of 4G communications, HD video and on-demand content. It’s not always the trains themselves though. On the …

Blogging like a train!

This weekend we’re doing something a bit different. It’ll involve one phone, a few battery packs and a lot of train journeys. From Friday all of my posts, pictures and updates across the weekend will be created and sent purely from my phone. We’re going to see if …

Could network roaming be coming to the UK?

Network Roaming is one of those break through events that we have been expecting for along time, but a lot of us were starting to suspect that it would never happen. The ability to roam across networks would allow users who find themselves without service to switch to …

WiFi on the London Underground, now in 150 stations

Remember when people said that WiFi on Tube stations was too costly and difficult to install? That the age and complexity of the transportation system would be a nightmare to overcome? Now we have 150 stations in the network with WiFi switched on and, whilst it’s a shame …

Phones 4u confirms 1,700 job losses. More to come.

Sadly, as predicted, 1,700 jobs are to go from Phones 4u stores. The remaining 362 outlets will close and 628 staff at the HQ have already been made redundant. Carphone Warehouse, EE and Vodafone have carved up the remaining stores and retained their staff. The administrators confirmed that …

The times, they are a-changing

This morning Phones 4u stores up and down the country have closed their doors. They have effectively been blocked from trading by their suppliers. If you operated lots of ice-cream vans but all the suppliers of ice-cream refused to supply you, you’d be pretty much out of business. …

National roaming? No thanks, say the networks

A few months ago we brought you news that the government wanted the UK networks to band together to eliminate blackspots by sharing their masts and hence network signal in a similar way you roam on another network whilst abroad. However according to the Financial Times, the networks …

Switching? Wait!

I got asked a quite simple question last night, and it got me thinking… @gears is Three a good network now? I remember you could never get a signal. I only want to renew with networks that offer unlimited data. — Sean Dale (@SeanDale) July 15, 2014 Changing …

Vodafone Smart 4 Power and Smart 4 Turbo announced

EE have already released their own 4G handset and now it seems as Vodafone want to join the party too. They’ve just launched the Smart 4 Turbo and, coming soon, they’ll have the Smart 4 Power. These are aimed at lower end of the market and will bring 4G to …

EU Reduces Roaming Charges Cap yet again

Are you planning on taking a trip to one of our fellow EU Countries this summer? Well if you are you’re in for a treat. The EU has managed to reduce roaming charges yet again to help us all save a few pennies when we travel in the …

Networks to share masts under ‘National Roaming’ plan?

I’m sure most readers will be aware of Roaming when they go abroad, whereby their phone connects to a foreign network to allow you to make calls, send texts or access the internet when in a different country. But what if you could do it in the UK …

LG G3 launching on Three UK 26th June

LG have started sending out press devices of the new LG G3 so that sites can get reviews up, and that means the general public should also be able to purchase one shortly. We heard lots of talk that the G3 will launch in the UK on the …

With Vodafone? Get ready for some price rises

You could be seeing a 10% monthly price hike on Vodafone soon. It’s not the actual contract cost but the cost of the out-of-bundle charges that are going up. The network will be working out how much costs will increase based on a “three month profile” and will …

More WiFi hotspots on the Underground

If you’re daily commute takes you through Golders Green, Southgate, West Kensington, Parsons Green, Kilburn or East Putney then we have some good news. Virgin have scrambled into the relevant places and spread some WiFi love all over these stations. The Virgin Media hotspots will be available tomorrow, …

Update LG G Flex Coming To O2

Good morning folks and I hope you all had a pleasent weekend. For those of you that have been keeping up with the latest tech news, you will no doubt be aware that the LG Flex has not just made it out of prototype stage but it is …

Deal agreed to protect customers from mobile “bill shock”

EE, Three, Vodafone and Virgin Media have today agreed to a new cap, proposed by the Government, on mobile bills. We’ve already seen some new measures getting announced, such as the option of ending a contract early if bills are increased mid-contract, but now it’ll be extended. A …

Hey Google, you missed a trick

Those Google Streetview cars have definitely given us all a valuable new tool. TV shows and news broadcasts always tend to use the Streetview images to get a quick visual and they supplement the existing top-down maps very well indeed. Sure, there was a fair amount of controversy …

Londoners see big speed improvements thanks to 4G, but EE still leads

RootMetrics have been busy testing the performance of EE, Vodafone, O2 and Three. They’ve done 86,000 speed tests and London has shown some great speeds from EE. EE customers in the London area received speeds which were around 10MBps faster than any other operator. The average download speeds …

Could EE’s 4G bandwidth fees quadruple?

Ofcom has published a consultation on greatly increasing annual fees for the 900MHz and 1800MHz spectrum bands in the UK to bring them more in line with the additional bands auctioned for 4G coverage. This could see rises in the amounts that networks pay to run their mobile …

Streaming data, it’s both a sales pitch and a problem

As I’ve mentioned earlier I’ve switched networks recently and, whilst looking around, I checked into my usage habits. Streaming. That’s a big one. I love TuneIn because, put simply, every single station I find on FM radio is very samey and full of similar-sounding DJ’s saying similar-sounding things. …

The future of mobile data – a lot more, a lot quicker

We’ve been having a poke around the Vodafone blog recently. We’ve done this mainly because they stuck £4000 in our hands and told us too*, but there’s some pretty interesting posts about the future of smartphones and the networks they run on. In this post the Vodafone UIK …

Sainsbury’s Announce Their Own Mobile Phone Network

Sainsbury’s has announced they are launching their own mobile phone network Mobile by Sainsbury’s this summer. Luke Jensen, Sainsbury’s Group Development director is quoted as saying: “Our customers trust us to provide top quality products and service at fair prices, and Mobile by Sainsbury’s feels like a natural …

Had a big phone bill? It’s nothing compared to this, but..

You may have seen stories about the recent Orange customer who received a rather substantial bill. His Business Sense 1500 plan covered 10 phones and had bills of around £300 per month. Alan and Carolyn Mazkouri, from Swansea, have been with Orange for 15 years. However, one day …

Sad news, 4G at 800Mhz fails to kill “Made in Chelsea”

Television, the drug of the Nation. Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation. But hey, things are still looking good for the 800MHz tests that are being performed by at800. They’ve moved onto London and have also performed tests across Brighton. Everything so far is looking good, with no complaints …

5G approaches, data limits explode.

Want to bust a 1GB monthly bandwidth allowance in just 8 seconds? 5G could be your answer, and Samsung have now achieved a speed of up to 1.056 Gbps for up to 2 kilometres, roughly 1.2 miles. Using a frequency of 28 Ghz they’ve used “adaptive array transeiver …

Big rise in customers taking SIM Only deals

Everything seems to cost a lot more than it used to and you’re working twice as hard for half the money. It’s rubbish. Phones are expensive, contracts are long and, if you’re on “certain” networks, the price goes up half-way through. To put it bluntly, we’re all a …

EE Results are out – 318,000 customers on 4G

The details for the first quarter of this year show that demand for the 4G network seems to be in line with company expectations. The 4G section has been in operation for five months now and, with 318,000 customers using the shiny new masts, they’re looking to hit …

Samsung Galaxy S4 – Which networks are taking it?

Time for a quick round-up on which networks will be picking up the Samsung Galaxy S4. Now, if I’m a betting man, I’d put £10 on all of the networks picking it up, but here’s how things stand currently.. T-Mobile T-Mobile have stated that they will carry the …

A new European network heading our way?

If you’re in the US you’ll know that, whether you’re in New York or Los Angeles, calling your friends in other American cities isn’t that expensive. However, if you live in the UK and travel the short distance to France you’ll suddenly find that calling costs ramp up. …

Google Wallet coming to the UK? [UPDATE]

One of our eagle-eyed readers (thanks, Daniel!) has spotted a signup page for Google Wallet – on Google UK, no less. The signup page, located at www.google.co.uk/wallet/, promises that the next version of Google Wallet is “coming soon”, presumably with UK support. This signup page is nothing new – the …

4G Speeds – A reality check

I’ve written about this before, but I think we need a revisit today. Last night we gave you the pricing and plans for the UK’s first 4G network – EE. It’s provoked quite a response and a lot of questions. Some expected something different. Perhaps more data allowance …

Opinion: EE & 4G – Is the Future Bright, is it iPhone?

Olaf Swantee, CEO of Everything Everywhere took to the stage at the science museum in London this morning and declared that his new brand EE is the future.  The future of digital Britain, the future of telecommunications on these fair islands. It was a slick presentation, extolling the …