EE woos iPhone 4S customers to 4G with £99 upgrade
T-Mobile and Orange customers with an iPhone 4S, Samsung Galaxy S III or HTC 1X can upgrade to 4G for £99, according to parent company EE.
The mobile operator is giving people the chance to swap these handsets for a 4G version and switch their contract to a 4GEE phone plan, if they want to get the faster speeds delivered by its soon-to-launch 4G network. They will be able to move to the iPhone 5, the Samsung Galaxy S 3 LTE or the HTC One XL, among other smartphones.
The offer runs out on 31 December, and is open to retail customers only. They must be less than six months into their existing plan and sign up to a new minimum-term contract, too.
Pricing for 4G contracts was revealed today by EE, with tariffs starting from £36 a month for consumers and £30 for small businesses. However, there are no unlimited data plans, which means customers will be charged extra for downloading data beyond their limit.
EE's 4G network is scheduled to go live in 10 UK cities on 30 October, with coverage expected to reach another six by the end of the year. The launch will give the operator a head-start on rivals Vodafone and O2, which must wait until the spectrum auction in early 2013 to get started on their 4G networks. Three has the 1800MHz now cleared for 4G use, but cannot exploit it without the go-ahead of EE, from which it bought the spectrum.
Orange and T-Mobile have plans tied to the Huawei Ascend P1 LTE, Samsung Galaxy Note II LTE, Nokia Lumia 920 and Nokia Lumia 820, as well as the handsets listed above.