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O2 has been busily rolling out its 5G Standalone network across the UK since February 2024, but until recently it hadn’t enabled the service in Wales. That though, has now changed.
O2 has announced that its 5G Standalone service is now available to more than 800,000 residents and businesses in Wales, covering nine large towns and cities, 18 smaller towns, and 133 villages.
A full list of locations hasn’t been provided but it includes Cardiff, Newport, Barry, Barry Island, Cwmbran, Penarth, Risca, Chepstow, Caldicot, Monmouth, Llantwit Major, Caerleon, Dinas Powis, Radyr, Magor, Rhoose, Sully, Roglet, Tongqynlais, St Athan, Pen-y-Rheol, Thornhill, Whitchurch, and Morganstown, among others.
Professor Robert Joyce, Director of Mobile Access Engineering at O2, said: “This is a significant step forward for mobile connectivity in Wales. We’re expanding 5G+ across cities like Cardiff and Newport as well as towns, villages and rural communities right across the country, bringing faster speeds, lower latency and a more reliable experience to more than 800,000 people.”
O2 only announces that a place has 5G Standalone coverage once it has at least 90% outdoor coverage, so the above places should have quite widespread 5G Standalone availability.
And with this latest switch-on, O2’s 5G Standalone service is now available to more than 86% of the UK’s population, so it’s widely available outside Wales too.
Faster and more reliable
That’s great news, because 5G Standalone is a big upgrade on the non-standalone form of 5G that the UK’s networks all initially rolled out.
With this upgrade, there’s no reliance on any legacy 4G infrastructure, which means the 5G networks become capable of higher speeds, greater reliability, improved efficiency, and even support for new use cases like network slicing — the ability for virtual networks to be created and customised to the needs of a specific service or customer.
Of course, O2 isn’t alone in upgrading its network to 5G Standalone. EE for example recently announced that its 5G Standalone service was available to more than 50 million people across the UK, and Vodafone is rolling out such a service too.
