Ultrafast 5G broadband for
towns and cities

5G is the latest method used by mobile operators to transmit data over their networks. As it’s the 5th generation of mobile data technology, it’s much faster – typically six times faster on average than 4G. Newer devices such as today's smartphones and tablets can use 5G to give you high speed internet access when you're out and about, with no reliance on any cables or wires.

But by using the latest in router equipment, 5G can also be used to provide lightning-fast and reliable broadband to a single fixed location, like your home or business, providing that there’s sufficient signal coverage. And if there is, then ultrafast 5G broadband can be deployed nigh on immediately.

The 5G that we see today being deployed in cities and other major population centres is mid-band 5G. That’s what our current 5G services use and they are more than capable of delivering ultrafast broadband (so, download speeds in excess of 100 Mbps).

The next few years will see an increasing roll-out of 5G, but the technology used to cover regions outside cities (so the majority of the UK) will actually be low-band 5G. Low-band 5G transmissions travel a lot further, so will offer much wider coverage – but the speeds that low-band 5G will be able to offer will be in the region of 50 to 60 Mbps. We will also be offering low-band 5G broadband as soon as it becomes available – see here for more information.

It's just not possible to give exact estimates of the speeds that urban 5G broadband will deliver at any given property, because performance depends on so many factors unique to each location.

However, what we can say with confidence is that our urban 5G broadband will easily surpass ultrafast speeds – so, providing download speeds comfortably above 100 Mbps and therefore very much faster than the “fibre to the cabinet” (or FTTC) based broadband which the vast majority of the UK uses.

Although in our testing, we’ve seen urban 5G speeds well into the 300 Mbps range, we’d always prefer to underpromise, then overdeliver if at all possible. That’s why we always refer to the average speed that our customers can expect, when measured across UK’s 5G-covered cities as a whole. And that ultrafast 100+ Mbps figure isn’t something we’ve dreamed up ourselves – it has been independently audited and verified, as you can see for yourself by clicking here.

And remember, unlike many other alternative broadband services, the speeds we provide over 5G are never throttled - so all your data is always transmitted at the fastest rates available at the time.

As with any broadband service, actual performance depends on many factors, such as overall demand on the Internet resource being requested and network congestion at the time.

The big difference is that 5G-delivered broadband doesn’t use landlines, which means it can be provided pretty much immediately in any location with sufficient coverage. And of course the ultrafast performance of urban 5G broadband is considerably faster than standard fibre-based services.

But apart from those twin benefits of near-instant availability and much higher speeds, 5G broadband will behave in an identical way to any other broadband service in pretty much every respect – including latency.

Latency is the time it takes to identify the internet resource you've requested and to respond. The natural latency level of a 5G-based broadband service is around 20 milliseconds.

That’s very similar to that of landline broadband. So with 5G powering your broadband connection, all your internet-based activities (such as web browsing, email, streaming TV, downloading movies, gaming, online shopping etc) will run at lightning speed.