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Topic: 4G

4G hands-on: Testing the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S3 on EE's network

Summary: EE is poised to unleash 4G LTE services on the UK. ZDNet got hands-on with the network to find out just how fast the first UK-wide 4G network really is.

Ben Woods

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EE, the mobile operator formerly known Everything Everywhere, has still not publicly announced when it will start offering 4G services to its customers in the UK. That didn't stop me from making my way over to Paddington, near the company's London offices, for a hands-on test of the network - to find out exactly how fast it can go.

I started off by running a speed test using the SpeedTest.net app on two iPhone 5 handsets. The one on the left was restricted to using a 3G service while the one on the right was running unrestricted on the EE 4G network.

While there wasn't a huge difference in ping times between the two speed tests, download and upload speeds diverged noticeably: the 3G-restricted handset managed to pull a respectable 4Mbps downstream and 2.5Mbps upstream while the 4G LTE service delivered nearly 35Mbps down and just over 13Mbps up.

Image: Ben Woods

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Topics: 4G, Mobility, Smartphones, Telcos, United Kingdom

About

With several years' experience covering everything in the world of telecoms and mobility, Ben's your man if it involves a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or any other piece of tech small enough to carry around with you.

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4 comments
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  • Download speeds

    "In the picture above, the iPhone 5's 4G download speeds (around 7.5Mbps) seemed to fair worse than the Samsung Galaxy S3, centre (just under 15Mbps), or Huawei Ascend P1 LTE, right (just under 30Mbps)."

    What would make one phone download so much faster than the other on 4G?
    If I'm thinking in PC terms, the speed bottleneck is usually the internet provider and not the PC hardware or modem. Is it the case that mobile phone hardware is not ready for these speeds yet?
    justanumber
    Reply Vote

    • Reliable data rates

      I think it highlights a few things about this technology.

      Data rates will depend on the mobile phone as the chipset used will be different (a bit like different performance on WiFi connections).

      But what it also highlights is that in a controlled environment (as Mytheroo points out next to the transceiver with negligible traffic loading) there is still massive swings in performance on the same device. For the iPhone it goes from 5 to 40Mbps. That is a massive swing in speed - although 5Mbps is still in my opinion an acceptable speed.

      This should become part of a standard review just like battery life is now?
      trinityict
      Reply Vote

  • 3G

    Having been with Orange for the last 7 - 8 years, I've noticed their 3G service has become shockingly bad over roughly the time since they started merging services with T-Mobile. I guess I'll need 4G to get decent service in future.
    DJL64
    Reply Vote

  • 3g vs 4g LTE

    A good 3g signal suits pretty much everything you can throw at a phone (tablets and 3g netbooks etc will benefit) so for phone users the only interesting stuff is where the 2100Mhz 3g signal isn't strong enough for streaming video but maybe the 1800Mhz 4g LTE is.
    Standing next to the transceiver is a pretty irrelevant test for me :-)
    Mytheroo
    Reply Vote
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