Tag: speed

5G Mast in Bath rejected after hundreds of residents voice concerns

An existing Three and EE 5G mast in Charlcombe Lane, Bath, looks like it might not be upgraded to 5G after 343 residents complained about the development. Their concerns appear to surround the apparent belief that 5G is somehow dangerous. This despite the fact that it uses frequencies …

That Vodafone unlimited Christmas data is full speed too

If you choose an unlimited plan with Vodafone there’s three different types. All will deliver unlimited data, but the maximum speeds differ. As an example, “Unlimited Lite” delivers speeds of up to 2 Mbps, whereas “Unlimited” gives you up to 10 Mbps and “Unlimited Max” provides the fastest …

Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 5G CPU – First smartphones announced

Just mere minutes after the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 CPU announcement and we’ve already got handset manufacturers signing up to using it. Xiaomi claim to have the “World Debut” with the new ultra-speedy mobile chip powering their upcoming Mi 11. A recent tweet has confirmed the details.. Are …

Couple save over £500,000 by NOT using wired internet

It’s doubtful that mindsets will change overnight, but getting broadband into your home or business no longer means sticking to a wired provider. With 5G on the horizon, the mobile networks are poised to take a substantial slice of the market – potentially delivering faster speeds in more …

Another real-world 5G test

My son and I headed to Wembley a year ago and, while I was in the area, I decided to check out the new 5G connection that had popped up on my phone. Getting 5G back then was a hit-and-miss affair, and it was really only to be …

Slow VPN speeds with Sky Sports? Here’s what to do

If you’re using a VPN to unblock Sky Sports from anywhere in the world, you might have noticed a slight drop in your original online speeds. Don’t worry – it’s completely normal. VPNs depend on your original speeds, and they will slow them down a bit. Your traffic …

Everything is awesome, at 60fps

If you’ve got kids, chances are that you’ve watched the Lego Movie or one of the spin-offs. They’ve been created to look as if everything is filmed in traditional “stop motion”, however in reality it was done on a computer. Anyways, stop motion filming has long been used …

Vekkit e-bikes now get 2-speed motors

You remember these guys, right? They sell conversion kits to turn your “normal” bike into an e-bike. We covered all this back in June, including how it all fits together. Now they’ve got a new 2-speed motor, so you can knock it into a lower “gear” effectively to …

Virgin Media giving away £450 headphones to new customers

Want faster broadband? Fed up of laggy gaming Well, right now the guys at Virgin Media are delivering some extra goodies with their packages and you’ll benefit from some of the fastest speeds around. Delivered over cable, I made the switch to cable broadband a while ago and …

RedMagic 5S – Buy now!

Back in sunny July we told you that the RedMagic 5S would be arriving in September and, well – here we are. Head to the UK site to get yours for £539 for the 8GB / 128GB Sonic Silver one or £599 for the 12GB / 256GB Pulse …

Honor launch the new Router 3

Need a new router? Fed up of the one your ISP gave you and want to perhaps get a far better coverage by whacking something better in? For £79.99, this is the new HONOR Router 3. It’s got WiFi 6 Plus (3000Mbps speeds), OFDMA technology (super-quick simultaneous connections …

What does the future hold for Huawei and 5G now?

A lot has been said about the new 5G technology. Fears and conspiracy theories have spread across Facebook despite UK 5G being at a lower frequency than a lot of home WiFi networks. There is, though, more immediate problems for 5G if you’re Huawei. The US has effectively …

Nokia straps a rocket to 5G with a massive 4.7Gbps speed test

Last night I got about 50MMbps via my Vodafone 4G data and I thought, to be honest, that’s really not bad. Considering that the fastest normal ADSL (fixed line) speeds round here are around 30Mbps. 5G though, that’s the next big thing, and Nokia have pushed the all-new …

Site / server update

We’ve now been online for over 18 years and, it’s fair to say, we’ve seen quite a few things during that time. In the last few months we’ve seen our traffic increase dramatically – properly off-the-chart and like nothing we’ve ever seen before. This has led us to …

5G launches in 21 new towns and cities

The guys at EE have flicked the switch so that 21 more 5G destinations are now available. It brings the total EE 5G locations to 71, which is more than any other operator. Areas benefitting include Rugeley, which is just up the road from where I’m sat, plus …

Speedy 5G. “Downloading” will be a distant memory.

Back at college I vividly remember writing an essay about the future of the internet. The conclusion was that everything was going to get faster, and there’d be more content. Up until fairly recently, that conclusion has been fairly accurate. As the years have gone by, we’ve moved …

Yet more speed

There’s no big IT team behind this site. We don’t have SEO specialists, marketing teams or designers. So, it usually falls to me to do all that. In addition to writing the stories, the server setup and the database back-end is something I’ve constructed. In the last few …

Lewis Hamilton gets a little carried away with 5G

So, we know what this is, right? Last year Vodafone recruited Lewis Hamilton to promote their 5G network (because Lewis is fast and – durr… so is 5G, right?) Anyhow, now they’ve got him testing out virtual reality games and it’s pretty cool to see the results if …

5G – Not quite ready yet

Back in August I parked up near Wembley Stadium to do some “real world” tests with a 5G phone. I did this because I’d seen testers competing to get the highest speeds possible. Usually this involved someone waiting for a quiet day – like a Sunday morning – …

5G Coming to VOXI too

The “youth” network that also takes the young at heart has announced that they’ll be delivering 5G to customers right now. The operator, which runs and is owned by Vodafone, had announced that contract-free 5G plans are now available. In addition, Vodafone are to deliver 5G to their …

Three customers now pulling an average of 10GB per month

Admit it, looking at a mobile phone package which delivers 2GB per month is going to give you cold sweats. You know, part-way through the month, that you’re going to be worry about visiting sites or checking anything on the internet because your data is bound to run …

Bigger, taller, faster. 5G mast plans.

Not got much signal? Well, here in the UK your signal could be hampered by a couple of problems. First is the actual geography and second is the planning obstacles. If there’s a “not spot” there’s also considerations on power, backhaul connectivity and the cost of renting the …

EE named as best mobile provider 2019

Rootmetrics, a US based company founded back in 2008, has one sole purpose – to provide mobile network performance information. Today they have published the results for 2019 testing of the UK networks. By using a batch of store-purchased Samsung Galaxy S9  smartphones, the testing itself was conducted …

A PROPER real-world 5G test

Whenever I look for 5G speed test, there’s usually YouTube videos showing blistering speeds. That’s expected, right? Well, yes. But I wanted to do some proper tests. How to do that? Well, first of all I’m not going to sit right next to a 5G mast. I’m also …

Three to deliver 5G to all with no extra cost

Three is the latest network to unveil its plans for 5G services and there’s a lot for consumers to get excited about. The big headline is the fact that you’ll be able to enjoy the upcoming 5G network (provided you’ve got a compatible phone) for no additional cost. …

Vodafone 5G Roaming goes live, and it’s the same price as 4G

There’s 55 cities and towns across Europe where you can now get Vodafone 5G roaming. That’s more than any other network. So, if you’re off on your holiday and you have a Samsung Galaxy S10 5G or the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3, you can roam for no extra …

Vodafone 5G – I feel the need, the need for speed.

Imagine you’re the marketing boss of a major network and you want someone to represent your company. Imagine that your network is about to launch a super-speedy new 5G technology which will fire data into phones faster than a bullet. Who would you choose? Usain Bolt? Well yes, …

Google Maps – Now with a speedometer

I’m probably going to open up a whole can of worms here, but your car speedometer, some of the time, isn’t right. For the most part, it only needs to be accurate to within plus or minus 5 mph at 50 mph. Here in the UK the law …

Three announces 5G launch date, complete with loads of spectrum.

It’s the “Need for speed” according to Three, and they’ve announced that their 5G network will arrive in August. By then there’ll be just London, but things look to be spinning up very quickly, with 25 towns and cities going live by the end of this year. Using …

Compared – 4G vs 5G

There’s no doubt about it, 5G is going to make an amazing difference to your data speeds. The throughput is astonishing and we’ve seen examples of entire movies being downloaded in seconds. There is, though, two very important changes that 5G will cause. The first, rather obviously, is …

Vodafone 5G phones go live. No Huawei in sight..

A partnership with streaming gaming provider “Hatch”, 5G roll-out plans and pricing. It’s all here from Vodafone today. They’ve also announced two 5G-ready handsets – the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and Xiaomi Mi MIX 3. No Huawei 5G phones. The pricing, according to Voda, is the same as …

Vodafone Gigafast ads get into trouble

As a techy geek, whenever I hear the word “Giga”, I think of “Gigabit”. Indeed, the word itself actually denotes a billion, and it’s got Vodafone into a spot of bother as they roll out their direct fibre solution – Gigafast. The offering is a FTTP (Fibre to …

The Android Bike Computer – On test

A few days ago I used lots of cable-tie to strap the ultra-small Unihertz Atom smartphone to my bike. You can have a look at the rather rudimentary fixings here or get up-close with the Atom in my earlier story. Yes, there’s a proper bike mount for this …

Manchester becomes the UK’s first 5G-connected airport

If you’re heading to Manchester Airport soon, check out the new Vodafone 5G trial area. You can test the new lightning speeds by grabbing a film or TV box set using the 5G technology. Further locations are coming soon, but if you’re at the airport you can now …

Three UK confirm their new aggregated 4G, delivering 4G+

Well, we hate to say it, but if you’re following us on Twitter and you read our earlier story, you’ll already know all this. We covered in detail some two weeks ago and right now we’re all basically doing this in the Coolsmartphone office. Today Three have confirmed …

EE switch on their first live 5G site

Moving from 3G to 4G now seems like a distant memory. Indeed, on the very, very odd occasion that I do drop to 3G I suddenly think… My God! 3G is terrible. How did we cope with this?! But wait, forget about 3G. We’re using 4G and already …

Virgin boost 4G data speeds

Virgin Mobile are doing some great offers right now, especially if you are in need of a SIM-only contract. The company run their network off EE signal, which gives them access to a huge 4G footprint already built, and still improving all the time. Until now customers have …