O2 has announced that it’s successfully switched on a ‘Giga Site’ in London. This site – which is located in Paddington – is one of the first deployments of its kind on a live European network, and it’s the first of many on O2, as the network has said it plans to switch on 1,000 Giga Sites across the UK next year.
That’s good news, because this first Giga Site uses Nokia’s cutting-edge dual-band massive MIMO technology to combine multiple spectrum layers. There’s low band spectrum to provide strong coverage, mid band spectrum to improve capacity, and high band spectrum to deliver extremely fast speeds.
So that’s coverage, capacity, and speeds handled all at once, allowing for O2 to improve its 5G performance in the area, with higher speeds and more reliable connections.
In fact, the network claims this site can deliver more than 10Gbps of throughput, which is more than the entire O2 network carried at the peak of the London 2012 Olympics. Put another way, it’s enough to support 2,000 simultaneous 5Mbps HD video streams.
New sites powered by new spectrum
This Giga Site – and the rest that the network has planned – makes use of the spectrum O2 recently acquired from Vodafone.
The latter network sold 78.8MHz of its spectrum to O2 as part of its merger with Three, which means O2 now holds around 30% of the UK’s mobile spectrum – which is about what it should have, since there are now only meaningfully three networks.
Dr Robert Joyce, Director of Mobile Access Engineering at O2, said: “The switch on of our first Giga Site here in central London is a really important demonstration of how we are investing and innovating to continue improving our mobile network and customer experience.
These new sites will deliver faster speeds, greater capacity, and more reliable connections for our customers. As we carry out upgrades and roll out hundreds more Giga Sites across the country, we’ll put our new spectrum to work helping us keep improving mobile connectivity nationwide.”
The installation of these Giga Sites is part of O2’s Mobile Transformation Plan, which involves spending roughly £700 million this year alone to improve its 4G and 5G networks.
Hopefully, these Giga Sites and O2’s other upgrades will have the desired impact, as right now O2 trails rivals for 5G speeds in most tests.
