Mobile Network Comparison

At long last, O₂ has announced its 4G LTE service for United Kingdom. The confirmed date that it will launch and the service will go live on 29 August 2013. The official announcement won’t take place until tomorrow, but this date is fixed already.

The whole country has collectively breathed a sigh of relief with this news, as this will finally see an end to EE’s monopoly on super high-speed 4G in the UK. Until now, super network EE which was made up of the merger between Orange and T-Mobile, has been given the opportunity to be the sole provider of 4G by Ofcom following the farcical spectrum auction fiasco.

EE’s 4G LTE service went live on 30 October 2012 so they would have had just over a year’s head start with this lucrative monopoly. Almost immediately, they cranked up prices and came under consistent criticism for price gouging. Hopefully, as their competitors are able to enter the market, will see a better deal for consumers wanting to take advantage of 4G mobile Internet.

Industry insiders have hinted as to how the rollout will progress next month. Initially the first part will see London and either Bradford or Leeds in the North of England receive their 4G capability before anywhere else. By the end of 2013, it is said that an additional ten more regions will have their the fast mobile Internet turned on.

O₂ have stated that the initial launch will see around 5 million of the UK population covered by their 4G service with this amount increasing by an average of 8 million every month. The next ten cities that will be added are going to be Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool, Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry, Sheffield, Manchester and Edinburgh. O₂ have also made the bold statement that they will smash the deadline set by Ofcom and have 98% of the UK population covered with their 4G service before the beginning of 2016.

We do have a few hints about the pricing structure, however. It has been revealed that O₂‘s SIM-only tariffs on 4G will come in at £26 per month. There will also be a special deal for customers wishing to switch over whereby O₂ are offering a 30 day guarantee allowing them to revert to their previous tariff if they are not content with their 4G service. Unfortunately, today we don’t have any more details about the exact pricing plan they’ve gone for.

In comparison, EE’s cheapest rates is currently £21 a month for calls and data. It also already has much broader coverage of 4G across the UK with almost 100 cities currently receiving coverage. Another negative points for O₂ is that it currently won’t be to support the iPhone 5 at the time of launch although we certainly expect that this will be remedied with later versions of the phone.

There are also some concerns about the frequencies that O₂ decided to buy at the recent Ofcom auction. Although they spent over half a billion pounds on mobile spectrum, most of it was in the long-distance 800 MHz band mini they have a bit of a shortfall in the high-capacity, high bandwidth 2.6 GHz band. O₂ already had a reputation for poor 3G speeds so it remains to be seen whether they also lagged behind after 4G has come out.

It’s also not yet clear whether the virtual operators who piggy-back on O₂‘s network will choose to offer 4G services too. Budget providers such as Tesco Mobile and Giffgaff have yet to announce whether they will offer 4G connectivity when it goes live on O₂ nor whether they will introduce new tariffs for this super-fast data service. We’re keenly waiting to hear what the situation will be.

As for the other networks, Three Mobile has said that it won’t charge any extra for its 4G service but that it is going to wait and see what all the other networks make available before launching its offer. It’s thought that this will happen just before the beginning of next year. Vodafone had always claims that their 4G service would be live by the end of the summer but no launch date has yet been announced.

Are you on O₂? Are you looking forward to the 4G launch and we take advantage of it? What you think the price tariff will be compared to EE? Do you think that Tesco Mobile and Giffgaff will go for it from launch? And are you concerned at all about the speeds you’ll be getting? Leave your comments below

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EE, the network bringing 4G LTE to the UK and the parent company of Orange and T-Mobile, have been shown to be avoiding untold billions in tax. They join Vodafone and LycaMobile amongst the shamed ranks of companies avoiding their tax liabilities.

EE’s latest accounts show that it has not paid anything at all in corporation tax in the UK. It is thought that the company is manipulating accounts so it technically makes a loss in the UK and can avoid paying taxes. This is despite the company spending millions for the spectrum required to provide 4G services and annual sales of £6.8 billion in 2011. Vodafone have been reported to be dodging £6 billion of UK taxes but it’s not clear exactly how much EE should be paying.

The revelations come as the debate about mega corporations failing to pay tax in the UK hits a peak. Activist group UK Uncut points out that people are told they must pay their taxes and that there’s no alternative to the ideological cuts to public services. Corporate tax dodging is thought to cost the state almost £100 billion per year yet, thanks to the Coalition’s crippling cuts and normal people are suffering while HMRC allows companies like EE and Vodafone to avoid paying taxes.

EE may legally be allowed to make use of this loophole while it lasts, but the British public are getting impatient will morally dubious tactics like this.

What’s your take? What do you think of EE not paying any corporation tax? Are they greedy thieves or smart? Do mobile companies have a social obligation to pay a fair rate of tax? And do you think the government should do more about it?

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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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