EE’s 1800MHz 4G service will suffer signal degradation in building says the UK’s biggest independent broadband site,think broadband.com.
“This is why the 800MHz band in the Ofcom spectrum auction is most likely to be the most popular one and it is that frequency where the hope of 4G providing a secondary layer to a true Digital Britain will come from”,think broadband editor Andrew Fergson.
This is not a slight on the mobile operators.It’s just one of those inevitable things arising from the physics of how radio waves travel. It should only affect data signal quality, as for voice calls the current generation of 4G LTE mobile phones actually use the 3G/GSM network for the voice calls. The next few years should see Voice over LTE, where the voice is carried as IP data on top of the new 4G signals. Of course there is also the 2600 MHz band in the auction, but this will suffer the attenuation even worse than the current EE band. The downside to the 800MHz band is that it is so close to the current FreeView frequencies that those close to cell towers may receive interference particularly on older devices. The use of a simple filter (with the first one per household free) should fix this, and the operators in conjunction with Government and Ofcom have a £180m plan in place to mitigate these issues”, claims Ferguson.
