Will benefit urban areas too, there's a lot of buildings in the centre of Loughborough where I'm on 1 bar 3G or GPRS and data is very slow or unusable. Outdoors is great so hopefully 800 will fix all the indoor issues here.

Do I need to get 800Mhz activated somehow on my account? Is that possible?

I have an LG G5 running EE firmware, and I've had VoLTE and Wifi Calling working for months so always assumed I had 800Mhz too. I just thought 800Mhz was rubbish and didn't make much difference.

Today I've used field test mode to force my G5 between 1800Mhz and 800Mhz. You can see from the screenshots here, it's not able to register on 800Mhz. Is this normal because I'm forcing it or am I missing out?

800Mhz

1800Mhz

That's 3 800MHz you're receiving, not EE 800MHz. Try a network scan while you are locked to 800MHz. If EE 4G doesn't show, it's not yet live in your area.

Well... The EE network is a tale of two halves at Woodhall Spa, this afternoon...

They have a major event on so it's very busy.
First test this morning, 3Mbps U21, 20Mbps L18.
This afternoon, possibly on a different sector of the mast, 50Mbps L18, <1Mbps U21...

A lot of EE phones in this area must still be 3G... Otherwise, why would U21 be so congested whilst L18 is fine?

Do we have any more information as to when 800MHz may arrive?

In Wrexham EE 4G is pretty poor , phones spend most of the time on 3G that's not fit for purpose. Very disappointed

Network not much better today, but when there's a large event going on, and there's just a single mast, do they expect miracles...

4g: 13mbps Down, <0.5Mbps Up.
3g: less than 0.5 Mbps

However, a much better outcome was from Colsterworth to Woodhall Spa. Used tunein radio as FM was very poor. Result, only one small dropout throughout the whole journey, and it was expected as the signal always gets lost there. On an older phone (Galaxy ace plus) it went from 3G to Orange GPRS.
I think WCDMA mode on the S4 really helped as there were quite a few areas where 3G is weak and the S4 would normally choose inferior GPRS or EDGE, which are both as useless as each other when it comes to tunein!

Do you really expect them to erect some new masts just for abnormal load on a couple of days every year? If performance is within spec every other day of the year, they won't spent the extortionate amount of money just to make it work on a couple of days every year until it gets near the point that every other day of the year is becoming too slow.

They do exactly that at Glastonbury....

CoW's say hello

I say, have you never heard of Glastonbury before? It was even mentioned on this thread.

4G was ok when I used it, but they definitely needed some more U21 capacity... especially since coverage was also affected, due to cell breathing. A temporary L18/U21 mast at each end of the village would have fixed it.

Though as you said, normally 3G (and now 4G) is fine.

Maybe some lighter load could be switched over to 2g Edge.. 😉

But we don't really want EDGE as call quality isn't as good as 3G/4G VoLTE (if VoLTE is switched on on that mast) and data rates on EDGE are just terrible. Even with the congestion over the weekend, when I could connect to 3G I was still getting more than 150kbps, which is what one would likely receive when using EDGE....

It's a shame that 2G and 3G on EE use different frequencies (unlike O2/Voda), as otherwise all but a couple of MHz of 2G spectrum could be shoved over to 3G, to help out with congestion and the like...

Speaking of, I really should have got an O2 SIM as well, to test out CTIL's upgraded UG09/L08 mast... though to be honest, I doubt that 5MHz of 3G900 would have held up either!

3G is legacy, no point refarming anything more over to it for day to day use. And for 4G at the moment EE has bags of spectrum that they don't need to refarm from other layers at the moment. When it's needed the MNOs will make the best use of the spectrum they have, they know what they're doing....

Also just because I have some spare time I'll address some other points from the last few days. The CoWs are expensive to operate and are needed in many locations, if the 4G is working fine they're not going to be used for 3G capacity, there are other priorities on the network that are far more important, more so than simply being slow where the network is unusable.

And lastly as said before EDGE/4G is the future, get used to it. I'll list just some of the reasons for this below, don't know why really as they have already been discussed ad infinitum but there seems to be a trend at the moment for discussions going in circles, anyway:

-EDGE has a hard cell edge and is on the same frequency as the primary 4G layer.
-Can be run in tiny spectrum amounts for the small amount of M2M and very legacy traffic that will be on it by the time 3G has been switched off.
-EDGE is perfectly capable of handling calls, we did it for years and as long as it's not crappy Half-Rate nonsense it sounds perfectly fine, if it sounded like it was being rerouted through the 1930s I'd understand.
-For the users who don't switch to 4G in the next 10 years they'll likely care so little about data that the reduced data speeds will not bother them one jot.
Last edited by lightspeed2398 : 18-07-2016 at 16:37

That all sounds very flash but I think 3G is the future. If I was an EE shareholder I would want to know when they are going to re-farm that wasted 4G spectrum over to 3G. 3G is the best after all. If only Martin Dawes was still alive, he'd set us straight. I bet he would have a decent 96 LDV too with the wider arches and the Peugeot engine. Nice truck that. Could do a lot of damage with one of those.

Might come as a shock but 99.9% of users will be quite happy if they can make and receive calls that are of a quality where they can hear the other party without difficulty irrespective of technology used.

Any more is just the rambling of the 0.1% with a wish for 3G to remain the primary carrier forever...

That's why they are all on VOD. Blah.........

I agree entirely, but I'd like to add this:

With EE's Emergency Services Contract and their pledge to have 95% geographical coverage by 2020, plus I'm sure I've seen somewhere about them wanting coverage everywhere that people go, even 3G will be a thing of the best very soon.

I haven't posted on here much so aren't as experience as others on here, but I would guess that as 4G at 1800 Mhz continues to be rolled out, as well as 800 Mhz switch on in the near future, it will get to a stage where 4G coverage is equal to or better than 2G (and 3G will be lagging behind). Assuming that all new phones are VoLTE capable by then, and that even the most basic phone costing £10 to £20 can call over 4G by then as well, they'll start announcing the end of 2G and 3G. Maybe 3G will go first as by then, those who care about data will have a 4G phone, and two years or so after the coverage is as good as 2G, 2G will be switch off.

Once this happens, 4G 1800 will be turned up to full power, therefore this will match the current 2G coverage anyway. 4G 800 will reach places that 2G doesn't currently reach, and of course they may well have some 4G 700 by then if they chose to bid for it. 4G 2600 will be rolling out to more and more places where capacity is needed, and then there's the spectrum freed up by the 2G and 3G networks that can be added to the 4G network.

It'll provide masses of 4G capacity and by this time, 5G won't be far off either!

I may be completely wrong, but with all the advantages of 4G plus the fact that 2G is now over two decades old and is older than analogue phones ever reached in this country, I can't be far off surely?

2G with coverage to match 4G will likely remain, so those people who won't have VoLTE phones can fall back to 2G. It's 3G that should go, and had the most problems fitting within a footprint due to cell breathing.

Refarm all 3G to 4G and use 2G for voice fallback and M2M apps. Eventually everyone will have VoLTE phones and M2M will be using 4G, so then 2G can go - but that will be some years.

Depends what you mean by matching 4G. Will match the 1800 layer but the whole point of 800 using VoLTE is it'll exceed both the 2G and 3G. 4G will be the furthest reaching technology within the next 12 months.

Yep pretty much. Got plenty of spectrum for 4G now and can add to that as 2G and 3G get depreciated. The future has got to be VoLTE and cheap 4G based. If EE are still selling 2G and 3G only phones by this time next year I think they'll have cocked it up. They need to shift focus to VoLTE ASAP.

The 95% Geo will most certainly be 4G only, just can't rollout 3G at 2100MHz to that within reasonable financial terms.

Glastonbury is a completely different story, without the CoWs, every cellular layer would be unusable (I've been told that 3G was unusable on numerous occasions this year, even with their mast setup - does that mean they need more masts?…) Here on the other hand, 4G is more than usable and 3G is still good enough for light browsing and calls/messages.

Due to the cost and limited availability of the CoWs, they can quite easily justify having six of them for one of the UK's biggest music festivals, but for an event in a village near Lincoln, not so much...

When people talk about the power of L1800 being cranked up, is it a case of doing it centrally and power all goes up instantly or must each mast be done individually which will literally take months and months to do? Also when they do up the power, will non VoLTE phones then fall back to 2g rather than 3g as it will be more powerful than 3G?

Do we think there will be a mass switch on of L800 at full power for VoLTE users?

At a guess 1800 would be all at once or in very large areas at a time but that is only a guess.
Yes non-VoLTE handsets will then CSFB to 2G. 3G will all but disappear for 4G users.
Not sure anyone knows what 800 is going to do.

They can decide if the phones check signal strengths of both the layers then go to the best one or only use 2g or 3G. Pros and cons to each.