Olaf Swantee, CEO of one of UK’s leading mobile operator EE, on Tuesday said that it will not be easy for other UK mobile operating companies to cope up with growing 4G service demand in the country due to their lack of spectrum access.
Swantee, while speaking at Huawei’s Mobile Broadband Forum held in London, claimed that EE is the only mobile operator company in UK which will be able to handle the increasing 4G demand in the coming years, while rival companies like O2 and Vodafone would struggle in handling the 4G demand.
EE owns 36 percent of both the 800MHz and 2.6GHz bands spectrum in the UK. This is the reason that the company won’t face any difficulty in matching the increasing demand unlike its other rival companies it claims.
“Other operators won’t be able to cope with demand in years to come. We have 36 percent of the spectrum in the UK, which is absolutely essential to delivering these kind of speeds and capacities”, said Swantee.
EE in addition to claiming to meet the increasing 4G demand in future also announced launching of a 300Mbps network in the UK on Tuesday. Available now in East London’s Tech City, the network will be made publicly to consumers by mid-2014.
Swantee said that EE is working alongside with manufacturers to make sure that future device can handle the 300Mbps speeds as current smart phones won’t support the high-speed connectivity. The telecom operator is also up with plans to move west in 2014 and cover the Central London with the LTE Advanced high-speed connectivity by the end of next year, He added.
Swantee also said that “We need to be ready for that next wave of growth, and we need to stay one step ahead. Today we are moving into the next age of 4G,” and “We will have LTE-A rolled out in London in 2014. We will have Central London covered in the initial stage, and we will be using fixed routers to ensure customers get those 300Mbps speeds.”
