Mobile Network Comparison

After a long wait, 4G LTE mobile internet went live in the UK today. Initially, only Orange and T-Mobile will offer it through their specialist brand, EE. 4G promises to offer much faster speeds than the previous 3G mobile data standard with EE promising a five-fold increase in available bandwidth. They hope that Britain will now become a leader in the global mobile industry after lagging behind the US and much of Europe in bringing 4G to consumers.

The initial roll-out will be trialled in several large densely-populated cities. Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Sheffield and Southampton will get 4G coverage first. The count will rise to sixteen areas in total by the end of the year when Belfast, Derby, Hull, Nottingham and Newcastle get 4G coverage. EE expect to rapidly extend the 4G coverage throughout 2013 and by 2014 well over 90% of the UK population should be able to get it on their mobiles. You will need a 4G-enabled handset like the iPhone 5 though.

However, the launch has been hit by several problems. First of all, as our analysis has already revealed, EE’s pricing structure for 4G makes the upgrade all but pointless. Pricing starts at £36/month for a paltry 500MB monthly limit and the other tariffs are are either so restrictive or so expensive that it’s hard to see how customers will be able to benefit from the upgrade. The lack of any unlimited data plans is also woeful.

Secondly, it appears that EE have imposed an artificial cap on the 4G bandwidth. While throttled bandwidth is not unheard of, there’s no real excuse for crippling what people are paying for. Especially when 4G is capable of providing speeds several times faster than the 12 Mbps limit they are said to be using. There has been no official confirmation that they are throttling but initial tests indicate that it’s probably happening.

Have you gone for the upgrade to 4G on your phone? What sort of speeds are you seeing with EE’s 4G service? And do you think it’s worth the money?

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There’s been quite a backlash following last week’s announcement of the 4G pricing on EE. Customers and commentators variously described it as a con and a rip-off. We wrote an in-depth analysis of the price scheme and what the tariffs would mean for you. But now EE have been trying to respond to the complaints and explain how it came to the prices it did.

We had various issues with the pricing of EE’s 4G tariffs. All had the same root cause – data pricing in the UK is exorbitant in general and will stay that way as long as customers let the mobile networks get away with it. The prices we have to pay as customers bear no resemblance to the actual charges incurred by mobile companies. Part of that is because none of the networks saw the importance of mobile internet quickly enough so they are all still playing catch-up. But another more important reason was something we didn’t touch upon so much in our first article: the decline of voice.

At the moment, Orange and T-Mobile (who make up EE) get most of their revenue for voice calls. By charging up to 25p/minute on PAYG and will expensive contracts, they get a huge amount of profit by charging high prices for making calls. However, with the rise of mobile internet, people use their phones to make calls less and less. Part of this is also due to applications such as Skype and the rise of VoIP. The phone companies are greedily trying to recoup their profits from other products and overpriced mobile internet is the obvious place to look.

So how are EE trying to justify this? Well to start with, they are saying because 4G makes such a difference compared to regular 3G, because it’s so much faster, it’s worth paying a premium for. We already covered this in our article though – there’s no point at all in have superfast internet if you can run through your allowance in a few minutes. Or if it costs more than a tenner to use it to watch a programme on iPlayer or 4od.

EE countered that customers aren’t using mobile data like that. They aren’t rushing through their allowances quickly or watching a lot of TV. Instead they are using their home wifi. This is completely missing the point. Customers aren’t using up their allowances in a matter of minutes because they can’t afford to. They have to be constantly vigilant and cripple their usage to ensure they have enough data left at the end of the month to check their emails. What’s the point of having fast 4G if you have to use it as if it were 3G? The same applies to not using it to watch streaming video and TV. And in any case, they are paying a separate company for their wifi connection and if they are using wifi for streaming why bother with 4G?

Another big criticism we had was the lack of unlimited tariffs. EE went on to say that most customers use only about 1 or 2 GB a month even on unlimited tariffs. But surely that’s largely because 3G is too slow to download much more than that? And many others don’t use much data to keep within their limits and avoid huge overage charges. EE are constantly drilling home the point that 4G is so much faster than 3G. But it’s so fast you can’t use it or you’ll use up your allowance. The point of 4G is it’s meant to open up all these opportunities to use mobile internet in a new way but with strict low data limits, this can’t happen.

Any, underlying all this, 1GB of data is 1GB of data whether you get it at 4G speeds or 3G speeds. The simple facts are you have to pay more for the same amount of data with EE. And compared to packages on Orange and T-Mobile, you have no option to go for an unmetered all-inclusive package to save having to constantly worry about how much data you’re using. There’s really no excuse for not offering unlimited internet tariffs as an option.

So while we have some sympathy for EE trying to make the most of their 4G monopoly and squeeze every last penny out, we still think they are conning customers and doing mobile data provision in the UK a disservice as a whole. From reading around it seems that nobody’s buying EE’s excuses right now. A braver forward thinking company would do things completely differently. What a shame.

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Following O₂‘s second widescale outage in recent months, they have been quick to regroup and initiate damage limitation. In an attempt to deflect the blame, they have claimed that equipment supplied by the Swedish company Ericsson caused the fault.

The outage hit on Friday afternoon on 12 October and left about three million O₂ users without service for several hours. Contrary to initial reports all services were affected including data – not just calls and texts. The issue persisted for several hours during the busy Friday night period and continued for days in some cases ruining many people’s weekend plans. The previous outage occurred just a few months ago in July, lasted about 24 hours and was caused by a similar issue.

As a result of the outage, Derek McManus, Chief Operating Officer, wrote that O₂ would be removing the Central User Database provided by Ericsson at a cost of £10 million. It’s not exactly clear whose equipment they will use instead but for the time being they will roll back to the previous solution.

The outage was caused by an issue with the Central User Database. This is the part that is provided by Ericsson and was introduced earlier this year. It forms part of the HLR or Home Location Register. This is the part of the network that holds information about the users and communicates with the central Mobile Switching Centre which acts like the main router – it controls all services across the network. Without a functioning Central User Database, the HLR breaks down and the Mobile Switching Centre can’t do its job – the whole network effectively breaks down for affected customers.

Even in spite of the removal of the faulty Ericsson equipment, pressing questions still remain for O₂. Firstly, if the fault is with Ericsson’s hardware and software, why did they no identify the potential issues prior to contracting it and installing it into their network. Did they not perform their due diligence or did they just go with the lowest bidder?

Secondly, and even more damningly, if inadequate failover systems and network redundancy was identified as being at fault for the first outage in July, why was this not addressed until now? Why was it not immediately fixed? It’s telling that, despite experiencing a major fault like this, O₂ attempted to patch over the cracks and hope for the best rather than implement a complete and final fix.

Some of you may remember this tweet from O₂ CEO Ronan Dunne last July:

To all our affected customers – I'm very sorry. The network is back. My focus now is restoring your confidence and trust in O2.

— Ronan Dunne (@ronandunneo2) July 12, 2012

Especially after claiming that they were trying to rebuild customers’ confidence, it seems strange that they didn’t plan for issues such as this and left faulty hardware in the system.

Even worse that this happening again is the conspicuously absent apology this time round. Quite how O₂ think it’s reasonable to have an outage of this scale and length and not even have the decency to apologise (let alone offer compensation) really beggars belief.

What do you think? Were you affected? Was it a mistake not to fix this permanently after the first outage. Should they have offered compensation? And what do you make of the failure to say sorry to those affected?

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