Analysis: How beneficial will 4G be to the UK?

How will mobile broadband speeds of 30-50Mbit/s in UK cities benefit the average smartphone user?

It is hard to tell how much fourth-generation (4G) mobile internet could be worth to the UK's flagging economy.

But considering how quickly smartphones and other 3G-enabled mobile devices seem be flying off the shelves, it is clear that mobile operators, phone and accessory manufacturers, retailers, application developers and the people they employ represent a significant commercial ecosystem that stands to make a lot of money by encouraging businesses and consumers into upgrading current mobile handsets to support faster mobile broadband speeds.

A shame then, in difficult times, that commercial 4G services expected to offer minimum bandwidth of 5Mbit/s and average throughput of 30-50Mbit/ are still three to four years away in the UK, despite having already been rolled out in parts of mainland Europe and the US.

In contrast, the UK is still at the trial stage, with O2 having announced a London trial of the latest Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G wireless technology this week.

The pilot will see the operator upgrade over 25 existing masts covering 15 square miles in London's Canary Wharf, Soho, Westminster, South Bank and King's Cross areas. It will run for six months, connecting up to 1,000 hand-picked users. A key aim is to find out whether peak rates of 100Mbit/s are actually achievable in dense urban environments where available bandwidth varies considerably according to the number of people connecting simultaneously and how close to the base station they happen to be, O2 head of LTE Rob Joyce told Computing.

"We learned in previous trials in Slough what a loaded network looked like, but with only 50 users we never got to test the signalling with lots of people," he said. "We think the minimum throughput for the guy standing at the cell edge will be 5Mbit/s, with closer to 100Mbit/s peak rates for those at the centre, but typical throughput will be 30-50Mbit/s."

Unlike the tests in Slough, which used 4G LTE equipment from Huawei, the London trial is based on networking infrastructure supplied by Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), which supports up to 3,000 simultaneous connections to each cell.

"We have not been able to test it at its limit yet, and hopefully London will get close," added Joyce.

With no 4G handsets as yet available, O2's trial will connect 4G dongles for laptops and other devices with USB ports - not ideal for testing a network that will eventually carry traffic from mobile phones due to significant differences in location and application usage behaviour but still better than nothing, according to Saverio Romeo, senior industry analyst at research firm Frost & Sullivan.

"A trial done on laptops, netbooks or laptops will not give you a lot of insight into mobility aspects but it is important that a mobile operator has started a trial in highly dense user environments because that is where the big challenge is," he said.

The big question is how many people will actually need that sort of bandwidth to push data onto a small screen, mobile device where HTML traffic has been optimised to work better over slow connections.

Analysis: How beneficial will 4G be to the UK?

How will mobile broadband speeds of 30-50Mbit/s in UK cities benefit the average smartphone user?

Whereas mobile phone users tend to engage more in messaging and web browsing activities, it is devices with larger screens that use the sort of applications O2 says will drive uptake of faster mobile broadband services: virtual private networks (VPNs) supporting large file transfers, video streaming and online gaming for example.

"If you don't have 10Mbit/s you could sit there for hours waiting for your iPhone iOS to update, for example, or to log on remotely when somebody is sending a 4-5MB presentation," said Joyce. "Everybody might not be streaming BBC iPlayer at 10Mbit/s but if you have everyone streaming at 1Mbit/s you need a system to cope with that."

"The industry is trying to create an environment in which any mobile device can support a variety of application from basic voice or IP communications to entertainment apps or software used to support daily life, like internet banking or mobile payments, and new ways to use mobile devices," said Romeo.

O2's London trial will use the 2600MHz frequency waveband, which Joyce believes is more suitable for high throughput but shorter reach mobile networks in towns and cities, different to the 800MHz band that BT Wholesale and Everything Everywhere (the name for the newly merged company formed by Orange and T-Mobile) is using to trial similar 4G services in Newquay which connect smaller number of people at greater distances at lower bandwidth.

The BT-Everything Everywhere tie-up will involve an estimated 200 people using either mobile 4G dongles or fixed wireless routers to test the technology, and is designed to demonstrate that LTE can and will (with the help of government subsidies on the infrastructure side) support mobile broadband over the 800MHz frequency band which is set to be released and auctioned off at the end of the 2012 when the analogue TV signals that currently occupy it are switched over to digital.

The government and telco regulator Ofcom is concerned that the UK is entering a ‘digital divide' where companies in rural parts of the country are rendered less competitive by a relative lack of high speed broadband compared to their city based rivals.

Research from Brocade released this week, for example, suggests that poor broadband in rural areas is having a negative effect on the tourism industry, with 1,700 people having recently applied for a Welsh government scheme offering up to £1,000 to tackle the broadband ‘notspots' which put local businesses at "significant disadvantage".

The biggest limitation to 4G rollout looks as though it will not be the lack of technology or arguments over standards – after a brief flirtation with alternative specifications like WiMax, Europe at least appears to have settled on LTE as the de facto standard for 4G (things are different in the US where Sprint Nextel is one operator to roll out 4G on Wimax).

What is more likely to hold things up is a delay to the UK government's auction of the 2600MHz and 800MHz wireless spectrum, as the four mobile operators involved – O2, Everything Everywhere, Vodafone and Three – bicker about which bits of the frequency band are available to which operators and Ofcom tries desperately to keep all parties happy.

"We [O2] just want a fair and open auction, where there are no rules, caps or caveats in terms of who can buy what – there is no preferential treatment and those who want the spectrum most will pay the most," said Joyce.

"I think there are problems around network sharing agreements. But I am surprised considering the state of mobile communications in the UK where operators are struggling to get the revenues they want from mobile data services, that they are stopping the regulator from going ahead not because it is slow but because it has to take certain steps," said Romeo.

"I think it was not necessary and it was much wiser for them to sit around the table, sort out their differences, and go ahead with the auction immediately."