Three Yorkshire cities among first to receive 5G next year
Mobile phone company EE has revealed that it is switching on 5G sites in 16 UK cities during 2019, with three Yorkshire cities included.
The first launch cities will be London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast, Birmingham and Manchester.
As well as the six launch cities, through 2019 EE will also be introducing 5G across the “busiest parts” of ten more UK cities, including Leeds, Hull and Sheffield. Also on the wider rollout list are Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry and Bristol.
EE is building 5G in the busiest parts of the six launch cites – including Hyde Park in London, Manchester Arena, Belfast City Airport, the Welsh Assembly, Edinburgh Waverly train station and Birmingham’s Bullring.
Marc Allera, CEO of BT’s Consumer division, said: “Adding 5G to the UK’s number one 4G network will increase reliability, increase speeds, and keep our customers connected where they need it most. This is another milestone for the UK and for our network journey – we’ll keep evolving as we move to one, smart network for our customers. We have an ambition to connect our customers to 4G, 5G or WiFi 100% of the time.”
EE said that tThe 5G rollout strategy was determined by the number of business and consumer customers the EE network connects in busy places, and the amount of data those customers use. For example, in the last three months alone, more than 2.1 million individual customers connected around Waterloo station, with just one site at the station carrying more than 100 terabytes of data per day.
The first 1,500 sites that EE is upgrading to 5G in 2019 carry 25% of all data across the whole network, but only cover 15% of the UK population.
