EE’s 5G network is about to get two significant upgrades – one of which affects its 5G Standalone availability, and the other its performance.
First up, the network has announced that 17 new locations will get 5G Standalone by the end of the year. Specifically, it’s coming to:
Basildon, Bolton, Brighton and Hove, Colchester, Gloucester, Lincoln, Maidstone, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northampton, Oxford, Plymouth, Poole, Portsmouth, Reading, Southampton, Southend-on-Sea, and Telford.
It’s worth noting that EE only counts a place as having 5G Standalone availability once there’s “at least 95% outdoor coverage“, so you should be able to expect that from these places by the end of December.
That’s good news, because 5G Standalone is a big upgrade on non-standalone 5G. When 5G first launched in the UK, non-standalone was all any of the networks offered, but that means some of the infrastructure is still designed for 4G, making these networks slower and less efficient.
5G Standalone also allows for new use cases, like network slicing and Voice over 5G Standalone (Vo5G).
An ARC upgrade
As for EE’s other announcement, the network has said that it has rolled out Ericsson’s Advanced RAN Coordination (ARC) technology in Manchester and Edinburgh.
This makes EE the first network in the world to use this tech, and it allows multiple nearby mobile sites to share their capacity, thereby boosting performance.
The company claims that this will improve download performance by 20% on average, and could more than double it under ideal conditions.
It’s not live everywhere in Manchester and Edinburgh though, right now it’s available around Waverley Station in Edinburgh, and in the city centre of Manchester. But this is just the start, with EE planning to also roll out ARC in London, Leeds, Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast, Cardiff, Newcastle, Sheffield, and Sunderland throughout the next year.
