O2 has hit a major milestone with its rollout of 5G Standalone, as the network has announced that this has been switched on in parts of 500 towns and cities now, accounting for more than 70% of the UK population, or around 49 million people.
That means it’s now the “country’s largest 5G Standalone deployment”, beating EE, which recently announced that its 5G Standalone service would be available to over half the UK population by the end of August.
It’s worth noting though that EE’s standards for when it announces a place as having 5G Standalone are slightly higher than O2’s. For EE, there needs to be at least 95% outdoor coverage in an area, while for O2 the figure is 90%.
5G Standalone, as a reminder, is 5G running over infrastructure that’s designed for 5G networks, rather than a mix of new and older 4G-era infrastructure, which is what non-standalone 5G networks use.
Newer, faster, better
With 5G Standalone, you can expect higher speeds, lower latency, improved efficiency, and other upgrades, like support for network slicing, so it’s a worthwhile improvement.
Disappointingly O2 hasn’t provided a full list of the places where it offers 5G Standalone, but it has said that Bakewell in Derbyshire was the 500th place to benefit.
The rollout is part of O2’s £700m Mobile Transformation Plan, which sees the company invest £2 million a day into improving its network.
And despite this major milestone there’s probably still lots of work to do on the 5G Standalone front, since while O2’s population coverage is now getting quite high, it’s likely that 5G Standalone availability is primarily in urban areas with a high population density, so geographic coverage might not be so good.
Still, this is promising progress, and hopefully it won’t be too long until all the UK’s networks have near comprehensive 5G Standalone coverage.
