telco_telco 09/05/2014 18:44 Page 1
4G: not good to talk
Steve Gold wonders whether multimedia content can meet user’s needs.
t seems – as I
suggested in a column
last year – that the UK
cellcos are copying the
business model of carriers
elsewhere in Europe, and
throwing everything at
rolling out their 4G
networks as rapidly as
possible. Given that most of
them – with the exception
of a handful of MVNOs and
Hutchison Three – are
charging a premium for 4G
services, it will be
interesting to see how
many customers upgrade
their handsets.
EE claims that its 4G
customer base reached 2.9m by
the end of Q1-2014, having
signed more than 800,000
customers up (to 4G) in the
quarter. Optimistically, the
company says it on target to
reach 6m 4G customers by the
end of the year. It’s only when
you dig into the figures,
however, that you realise only
5,100 companies have signed up
to the benefits of 4G as of the
end of Q1-2014. Revealingly, 59
% of customers are on contract
deals, generating a monthly
ARPU of £28.80 (€35.10),
compared to just £4.30 from
pre-paid customers.
That’s quite a gap, and
comes as no surprise, as a lot of
4G users on EE – myself
included - are making use of the
company’s aggressively priced
pre-paid SIM-only deals (e.g.
£16 for three months and 6GB
of data). EE’s total network
I
connections – including MVNO
clients – fell to 30.7m in Q12014, down from 31.4m a year
earlier. MVNO customers,
meanwhile, increased by a
modest 3.2 per cent to 3.66m.
Vodafone says that it had
around 0.5m 4G customers in
late February, whilst O2 UK
said it had twice this number as
of early April.
My observations suggest that
a sizeable slice of all UK cellco
customers on 4G are going
down the high-speed data route.
But there is a major challenge
coming down the technology
turnpike in that 4G voice –
known as VoLTE (Voice over
LTE) - still hasn’t been
launched. Put simply, this
means that 4G customers must
use 3G – and usually 2G –
frequencies for their voice
transmissions, increasing their
battery usage, as well as
creating the odd situation of
being able to use
high-speed 4G data
Steve Gold but unable to make or
From his base in
receive voice calls.
Sheffield, England,
Steve has been