O2’s 5G Standalone upgrade is now live in Gloucester

There’s good news for residents and visitors to Gloucester, because O2 has now switched on its 5G Standalone service in the city – which should benefit the roughly 138,000 people who live there, along with anyone on O2 who visits or works there.

5G Standalone is essentially end-to-end 5G, so it doesn’t rely at all on older 4G infrastructure. You might have assumed that all 5G was like that, but the initial UK rollout was purely non-standalone, and it’s only relatively recently that 5G Standalone has started to arrive.

This upgrade allows for higher speeds, lower latency, better efficiency and reliability, and even enables new use cases, like network slicing, so it’s a significant improvement – perhaps not quite as big as the jump from 4G to 5G Non-Standalone, but not far off.

The latest of many locations

O2 generally aims for “at least 90% outdoor coverage” with any place it brings 5G Standalone to, so that’s presumably the case in Gloucester, and this is just the latest of many places that have now received an O2 5G Standalone upgrade, as it’s now available in more than 500 locations, accounting for roughly 70% of the UK’s population, or around 49 million people.

Of course, O2 isn’t alone in rolling out 5G Standalone, as Vodafone and EE are also rapidly deploying the technology across the UK. Three seems to be falling behind here, but now that the network has merged with Vodafone it will presumably start to benefit from Vodafone’s 5G Standalone infrastructure.