EE has announced that it recently partnered with Nokia to deploy 200 new small cells across the UK to help boost its mobile network with additional 4G connectivity. While 4G is not 5G, you can still achieve download speeds of 300Mbps while connected to these networks so they should be fine for casual use.
Commenting on the news, David Salam, Director of Mobile Networks, EE, said:
“EE has been the number one network for eight years running and we are committed to maintaining the best possible customer experience. Investment and innovation are the key to consistent network improvement and this partnership with Nokia, to deploy small cells to support our 4G – and in the future, 5G – network, is a new solution to maintain our network leadership in the UK.”
Small cells are mobile radio cells that improve coverage at the street level where it’s impractical to build larger sites. Vodafone recently announced that it had used similar equipment on phone boxes to improve its network, EE is doing this too on red BT telephone boxes. Areas that will benefit first include Leeds, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, and Scarborough.
While this is a great start for EE, hundreds more deployments are planned for the next 18 months; this will boost network capacity in more areas including summer hotspots. The firm also plans to begin trials of Nokia’s AirScale portfolio to allow small cell deployments to give out 5G connectivity too.