Hasta La Gadget!

EE‘s DoubleSpeed LTE launch was the big news of yesterday’s event, promising roughly twice the 4G speed across twelve UK cities with no extra charge. It’s the carrier’s latest pre-emptive attempt to corner the high-speed mobile market before its rivals wade in with LTE of their own, so with theoretical peaks of as much 150Mbps, it only seemed fair to put the new DoubleSpeed service to the test. As we found, though, it’s not quite so straightforward.

EE’s promise is based upon some technical shuffling that pairs together extra chunks of spectrum. To be precise, rather than allotting 2 x 10 MHz as it was before, EE now uses 2 x 20 MHz in the 1,800 MHz spectrum band.

The end result, EE says, should be an everyday speed increase to 24-30 Mbps downloads, roughly double what existing users have been seeing so far. Initially, it’s live in twelve cities (rather than the ten initially promised): Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Derby, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Nottingham, and Sheffield.

We powered up an HTC One on EE and ran through some speed tests in various locations just outside of central London, with 4G indicated and between one and four bars of signal strength showing. Initial impressions were excellent: in a location where previously we’d seen around 13 Mbps down and up to 17 Mbps up, that jumped to over 42 Mbps down and over 22 Mbps up.

Moving round, though, we found things to be more changeable. 42 Mbps – higher, to be fair, than EE suggests – was the fastest we saw, while the fastest upload was just over 29 Mbps. More common, though, was a download in the low- to mid-20s and uploads around 20 to 22 Mbps.

What makes it somewhat frustrating, however, is the difficulty in actually pinning down DoubleSpeed service. Since there’s no change to the indicator – you don’t get “4G+” in the display or anything – it’s hard to know what you can expect. Meanwhile, the actual speeds we saw often proved unconnected to the strength of the connection on the signal meter: our fastest benchmarks actually came when we had just one bar showing.

Nonetheless, it’s an impressive turn of speed overall (when you’re in the right place) and the fact that EE won’t be charging extra for it is welcome. The DoubleSpeed 4G goes live today; if you’re in one of the served areas, run a speedtest and let us know how you get on in the comments below. We’ll be adding to our results with more as we test the network in other locations.

EE DoubleSpeed LTE on test: Fast, if you can find it is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

UK 4G carrier EE has revealed its latest devices, including an 802.11ac router for EE’s fiber, as well as detailing its shared 4G plans and double-speed roll-out. EE DoubleSpeed will go live on July 4th, the carrier has confirmed today, and offer up to 150Mbps theoretically, though in practice more like 24-40 Mbps; it’ll be available to new and existing subscribers (at no extra cost) in twelve cities, rather than the originally announced ten. There’s also a new mobile payments service in association with MasterCard.

Meanwhile, there’s also a summer promotion on the way: new sign-ups before September 30th will get more data for their money. EE also has a new data-only option for pay-as-you-go connections, initially offering three months of service for the price of a single month.

As for the mobile payments service, dubbed Cash On Tap, that offers NFC payments of up to £20 ($30) at over 230,000 UK outlets. First time users will get £10 automatically added on, and a local app will allow transaction tracking and balance enquiries.

For the home, meanwhile, there’s the EE Bright Box 2, an 802.11ac WiFi router for EE fiber subscribers. It’ll be offered free to plug-and-play to EE broadband subscribers for easy installation, and has four ethernet ports and supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz use.
Update: We originally reported the Bright Box 2 bridged an LTE connection; in actual fact it will eventually be able to do that with a USB 4G modem, though the first generation of boxes will only support 3G modems thanks to power-draw shortcomings on the port itself. EE tells us the second-gen version will provide enough power for 4G modems, though first-gen box owners won’t be able to upgrade as it’s a hardware shortcoming.

EE’s shared plans, meanwhile, will support up to five devices, with unlimited calls/texts for phones and up to 20GB of data. Adding a phone costs an extra £12 per month on a 12-month contract; adding a tablet or mobile broadband device will cost £5 more. A data limit alert is sent out at 80-percent and 100-percent of the allowance being used up, after which point internet access is denied until a top-up data bundle is purchased. More details – and pricing – in the gallery below.

It’s been an impressive few months for EE’s 4G network, which only launched in the UK eight months ago. The carrier now covers 55-percent of the UK by population, and expects that to rise to 98-percent by the end of 2014.

Meanwhile, independent metrics suggest EE’s LTE speed in the UK actually out-performs 4G in New York City, though given US service started earlier – and presumably has more subscribers – that’s maybe not so great a surprise. EE is also claiming that its network is on a par with the fastest 4G services in Korea, though that obviously doesn’t include the new LTE-Advanced.

Of course, EE can’t expect to have the 4G market in the UK all to itself, and its rivals are mustering their own LTE with launches later this year. Vodafone UK is already offering “4G ready” devices – most recently the R212 mobile hotspot – complete with latent LTE support, ready for when the carrier’s service goes live in a matter of months.

EE DoubleSpeed LTE goes live July 4; 802.11ac router, Mobile Payments, more is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Samsung may already have its 8-core Exynos 5 Octa offering, but the cunning “big.LITTLE” implementation means only up to four cores work together at any time — either the Cortex-A15 quartet or its lesser Cortex-A7 counterpart. In other words, we’d rather rename the chipset range to something like “Exynos 5 Quad Dual.” But according to recent intel coming from Taipei and Shenzhen, it looks like Taiwan’s MediaTek is well on its way to ship a true 8-core mobile chipset in Q4 this year.

Filed under: Misc, Mobile

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Source: Sina Weibo (login required), UDN (1), (2)

Camping outside a store for weeks on end has been done to death now, so what can you do to score some early adopter cred? How about buying a device to use on a service that doesn’t exist… yet? That’s Vodafone’s thinking behind launching its first 4G wireless hotspot, two months before its LTE service begins rolling out. The Vodafone R212 will connect up to 10 devices simultaneously, comes with a 32GB SD card reader, a 2,800mAh battery and will, thankfully, connect to the company’s 3G network as well. It’ll set you back £39 up-front if you sign up for a plan offering you 1GB of monthly data for £10 a month.

Filed under: Peripherals, Wireless, Mobile

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Via: Pocket-lint

Source: Vodafone

LTE spectrum is a hot commodity, and if you’re hurting for cash, it might not be a bad time to let some go. US Cellular just inked a deal to unload 10MHz of Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum, padding its pocketbook with a whopping $308 million in cash. Pending FCC approval, that wireless load will be making its way over to T-Mobile, which would then own the vast majority of AWS. It’s good news for T-Mobile customers, no doubt, especially those in the Southeast — according to a press release, the spectrum T-Mob just snatched up covers 32 million people in cities like St. Louis, Memphis, Little Rock and New Orleans.

Filed under: Wireless, T-Mobile

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Via: The Next Web

Source: T-Mobile