The company completely neglected the 2.6GHz band which may hurt its inner city performance, but with its extensive network of Wi-Fi hotspots in cities the bubbly brand thinks it will be OK without it. Vodafone spent the most at the auction- a whopping £790,761,000 and came away with 2 x 10MHz of 800MHz spectrum, 1 x 20MHz of 2.6GHz spectrum and a further 1 x 25MHz of 2.6GHz spectrum.ĮE spent £588,876,000 and secured 2 x 5MHz of 800MHz spectrum and 2 x 35MHz of 2.6GHz spectrum, which is less spectrum overall than Vodafone has.ĭon't forget that EE can also call upon the 1800MHz spectrum that it's been using since before the other networks even launched a 4G service though. Remember, more MHz means a better connection, so the more 'x GHz' of spectrum, the more widespread and robust a network can be. BT also came away with some spectrum of its own, before it acquired EE in 2016. The 4G spectrum auction held by Ofcom at the beginning of the 2013 saw winning bids from O2 (Telefónica UK), Vodafone, Three (Hutchison Whampoa) and of course EE. Ofcom's 2013 4G spectrum auction laid the foundations The most recent developments have seen 2100MHz spectrum EE uses for 3G refarmed for 4G ahead of a future 5G launch, and O2 win 2.3GHz airwaves at an auction earlier this year. The 1800MHz band is used by EE and Three and strikes a balance between coverage and capacity (falling between the extremes of the 2.6GHz and 800MHz bands) which makes it a good 'middle-ground' for getting 4G around the country. While it doesn't provide the same data capacity as the 2.6GHz band, the 800MHz frequency can easily travel over long distances and will be used to provide broadband speeds to rural areas where telephone exchanges can't reach.īeing low frequency it's also better at penetrating walls than the 2.6GHz or 1800MHz bands, so it will provide an improved signal when indoors. It was used to provide analogue terrestrial TV, but has been freed up since the big Digital switchover. The 800MHz band is the other spectrum that was sold at the same time. It has a greater data capacity than the other two bands so it can deal with loads of people connecting at once, but it doesn't fare so well over long distances, making it ideal for cities and other compact, densely populated areas but not so good for rural locations.
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