A few months ago we brought the story that EE were trailing their new worlds fastest LTE service at 300Mbps in the ‘Tech City’ area of London using the LTE-Advanced technology.
This service is only possible by pairing two lots of spectrum together to get super ultra fast services such as the 300Mbps standard and in testing, EE saw average speeds of around 270Mbps.
Now EE CEO Olaf Swantee has announced that this new LTE-A service will be rolling out to others starting in the London area and this should be complete by the end of summer with more being added over time.
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What we are not sure of yet is will this service be included for existing customers on their 4G Extra plans? You guys are already paying more for the ‘double speed’ network. Will you need a new plan? Will it be free?
Also then comes the hardware computability, as right now we have Cat3 LTE which supports 100Mbps. There is Cat4 LTE which supports the quicker 150Mbps service, devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and Sony Xperia Z1 support this.
However to hit these new 300Mbps speeds you need a new Cat6 LTE device such as the Huawei MiFi we saw at MWC just recently which does support this, but at present there are no phones available in the UK that will match this speed.
Hopefully nearer the time we will be able to bring you more concrete information on LTE-A on EE but it is a very exciting time for 4G here in the UK and soon London will be able to get the fastest speeds currently available anywhere.