O2 and 3 lag behind

[liggerz87]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/technology-48853070 also why I have to ad a number I have to press back to skip

[gmarkj]

Just read the article.
One thing stood out:
"The total cost of a 5G Samsung Galaxy S10 and two-year contract is £1,637 ($2,062) for Vodafone's cheapest advertised tariff."
How much?!?!?

[PhoneChanger]

Its mental, though if I was in the market for 5G, I'd buy the device from Samsung (still over £1000) and then go for their £30 per month unlimited data 5G plan (it could then replace my home broadband hahahaha)

[jonsie]

I'll just wait five years.....hopefully

[liggerz87]

Yep so expensive I did like get suckered in by the hype for 4g lol first place to get 4g in North Wales was Rhyl and it was ee that did it I remember being in Rhyl and was like wow 4g 30mbs download thought was fast after that I didn't really care about 4g lol I'm in Llandudno junction and 4g is here now lol

[liggerz87]

Ye the 5g S10 doesn't have sd card slot and also different camera on it

[Anonymous]

Lagging behind or executing a shrewd business strategy?

Vodafone and EE launch first and have to deal with the teething problems of new equipment (hardware and software), new Operational Support Systems (network deployment and management software) as well as analysis of changes in traffic patterns (is more being used? are there spikes at certain times of day? How well is the infrastructure handling these? Do we need to increase backhaul capacity?) and of course are we charging enough to cover the costs and make a decent margin?

Think O2 is doing what it has done before and is letting the first movers discover the pitfalls while it studies churn figures, customer satisfaction figures and other market data so when it launches the bugs in the hardware and firmware have largely been squashed and it knows it can come in with pricing the market will stand while making a decent margin.

As for Three it's probably even more cautious as it took 7 years to make a profit on 3G and video calling (which only used 64k anyway) wasn't the 'killer app' it's marketing portrayed it to be and people didn't want to pay 50p per MB of data.

[BOSSGOGG]

Vodafone's 5G tariffs confuse me.

All unlimited data but 2 of them limited on speed. 2mbps and 10mbps. What's the point of that?

[jonsie]

No point as 4G is faster than that. A selling point to show 5G on the phone maybe? 

[Anonymous]

@BOSSGOGG 

The lower priced ones are capped to reduce the volume of data by influencing user behaviour.

Most video and audio apps in a default configuration are adaptive so will drop the bit rate accordingly so you might want to watch a film in HD but if the app and the management plane at the provider determine the speed of the connection is a max of 2 Mbps it'll drop the definition to standard, they aren't capping your use, they are just capping the transfer speed to allow careful control of the network load.

I think there'll be a number of changes to the plans over the next 12 months as new competition arrives and the networks carefully analyse the traffic patterns of those moving onto the service so they can see if upgrades to backhaul are required (from the base stations to the core and from the core to the 'net).

Prices will drop over time but they'll be pricing in the above and taking advantage of the early adopters.

IP networks are more efficient than the old circuit switched but the constant increase in volume across fixed and mobile data networks is pushing up the costs to run them.