Businesses in East London's Tech City are will be the first to test a new high-speed 4G network being trialled by UK mobile operator EE.
Dubbed LTE-Advanced, the network will combine 20MHz of EE's own 1800MHz spectrum and 20MHz of the 2.6GHz spectrum it won in Ofcom's 4G spectrum auction to provide a theoretical maximum download speed of up to 300Mbps.
Companies based in the capital will be chosen to partner EE and trial the service before it becomes commercially available along with compatible devices from mid-2014.
They will be given a Huawei router that can provide a high-speed mobile Wi-Fi connection to up to 20 devices enabled with the 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard, with compatible smartphones and tablets able to reach download speeds of up 200Mbps.
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Business case
EE claims that LTE-Advanced will magnify the existing benefits of 4G, namely a greater ability to take advantage of Internet-based cloud services and work with larger volumes of data thanks to increased bandwidth.
The operator, formed after the merger of networks T-Mobile and Orange, was given permission to use its existing 1800MHz spectrum band to provide the UK's first nationwide 4G services in October 2012.
EE's 4G service is available in 131 UK towns and cities today. The company claims to have attracted over 1.2 million customers since launching one year ago, clocking an impressive 75 new 4G connections per hour.
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