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Three’s 5G has actually been running since last summer : I should know, I was in one of the pilot areas in London and signed up for their home broadband offerin

Three’s 5G has actually been running since last summer : I should know, I was in one of the pilot areas in London and signed up for their home broadband offering on day one. No complaints, 100-300Mbps on average. They seem to have done great at the 5G spectrum auctions, they’re the only UK carrier with 100+ Mhz. I’m also using them for mobile 4G and yes that’s often awful, as others are reporting. I should probably switch to giffgaff (safer to use different providers anyway in case Three has a catastrophic outage), but Three’s "Feel at home" free roaming in many countries beyond the EU (including the US) is super handy and has no equivalent that I know of.

Reason077 7y ago
> "Three’s 5G has actually been running since last summer : I should know, I was in one of the pilot areas in London and signed up for their home broadband offering on day one." But this is not really the Three network. It's a separate network with a different network ID and cannot be accessed with ordinary Three devices/SIM cards. It's based on the network formerly known as "Relish", which was bought by Three in 2017. The areas covered by Three Broadband's 5G are basically exactly the same areas which were always covered by Relish. They just upgraded the equipment to use 5G radio. Relish held a lot of spectrum in the 3.5 Ghz (n78) band. Three, by arrangement with OfCom, added Relish's holding to their own 3.5 Ghz spectrum won at auction to give them the contiguous 100 Mhz. There is an additional 200 Mhz of 5G spectrum being auctioned this year, which should bring the other operator's 5G holdings up to comparable levels with Three's: https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/ofcom-to-hold-next-5g-spectrum-auction-in-spring-2020 https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/ofcom-to-hold-next-5g-spec...
- exikyut 7y ago
  > But this is not really the Three network. It's a separate network with a different network ID and cannot be accessed with ordinary Three devices/SIM cards. I'm not in the UK and ask purely out of curiosity, but what SIM/configuration do you use then?
  - Reason077 7y ago
    They provide a 5G home router (Huawei 5G CPE Pro), with a SIM card specific to the Three Broadband (formerly Relish) network.

Reason077 7y ago

> "Three’s 5G has actually been running since last summer : I should know, I was in one of the pilot areas in London and signed up for their home broadband offering on day one." But this is not really the Three network. It's a separate network with a different network ID and cannot be accessed with ordinary Three devices/SIM cards. It's based on the network formerly known as "Relish", which was bought by Three in 2017. The areas covered by Three Broadband's 5G are basically exactly the same areas which were always covered by Relish. They just upgraded the equipment to use 5G radio. Relish held a lot of spectrum in the 3.5 Ghz (n78) band. Three, by arrangement with OfCom, added Relish's holding to their own 3.5 Ghz spectrum won at auction to give them the contiguous 100 Mhz. There is an additional 200 Mhz of 5G spectrum being auctioned this year, which should bring the other operator's 5G holdings up to comparable levels with Three's: https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/ofcom-to-hold-next-5g-spectrum-auction-in-spring-2020 https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/ofcom-to-hold-next-5g-spec...

exikyut 7y ago
> But this is not really the Three network. It's a separate network with a different network ID and cannot be accessed with ordinary Three devices/SIM cards. I'm not in the UK and ask purely out of curiosity, but what SIM/configuration do you use then?
- Reason077 7y ago
  They provide a 5G home router (Huawei 5G CPE Pro), with a SIM card specific to the Three Broadband (formerly Relish) network.