Originally Posted by Pedro_C:
“If they allow MBB devices, I can imagine it would hit speeds significantly. Guildford has one 800MHz mast, serving about 70, 000 people. It's tri-sector, so you 're looking at about 5, 000, 35, 000 and 30, 000 on each sector. 35, 000 sharing 40mbps of capacity is not going to work well if people use MBB.
"1800MHz", I hear you cry. yeah, good luck with that, they've only enabled about four sites...”
I agree, but I think 1800 would override it in the 1800 covered areas. I think that it's because for the 1st year of 800 the priority is coverage, when we get to the fill in stage starting in 12-18 months then these restrictions can be relaxed a bit.
I think people need to understand the business side to see why they do things from a technology standpoint. Each year there's a CAPEX and OPEX budget given by the CFO of companies, they will break that into 4 quarters. The CAPEX buys equipment and the OPEX pays for staff and other operations costs.
They can physically only buy X number of cabinets, poles, base station controllers etc and that can only send off orders to x number of suppliers or issue contracts within that budget. They can't over spend and invest above and beyond what makes economic sense for the business.
So what they do is plan the best way around it given the constraints you'll never get rid of in business. I suspect they have restricted 800 in the first phase to enable them to focus on coverage. If they let everyone on to 800 with so few sites the service was be affected and people would be screaming and shouting and making jokes about how poor the speeds are for 4G. So during the build out they are going to restrict it.
When the wider coverage is done and other urban 1800 masts and some more 800 masts get enabled, I suspect they will begin to reprioritise and relax the restrictions.
We're only what 6 weeks in to 800 and supervoice? over the next 6 months that device list will slowly grow and grow till in 12 months they might just flip the allow all switch with 1800 as priority and 800 as fallback for all.