5G IS COMING SOON

Launched at London Fashion Week, in partnership with the iconic Central St. Martins, the UK’s first consumer ready 5G has arrived.

We’re super excited and can’t wait to share our first bit of 5G news with you.

Fashion fuelled by 5G

Upcoming designer Gerrit Jacob used Three 5G to enhance his collection through Magic Leap mixed reality technology, showcasing how 5G could shape the future of fashion.

We want to show the UK the possibilities that 5G will create. As demonstrated at London Fashion Week, it’ll let us combine the worlds of fashion, design and technology to create new products and experiences that’ll change our lives forever.

So, what is 5G?

5G is short for “fifth generation mobile network” and is set to be the fastest network yet. 5G’s super-fast speeds, capacity and low latency are going to change the way we use data for gaming, movies, apps, downloads and high definition video streaming.

Building the UK’s fastest 5G network

We’re proud to be building the UK’s fastest 5G network and are passionate about the difference 5G will make to our lives. We’re investing in our network to bring our customers the best possible experience now and in the future.

“With twice as much 5G spectrum as anyone else, the UK’s first cloud core network, state of the art data centres and radio technology, our 5G network will be faster than all the rest – see three.co.uk/5G to find out more.”

We’re building the UK’s fastest 5G network.

5G is coming, and we’re excited to be building you the fastest 5G network in the UK. Pretty big claim, right? We can back it up, too. We’ve got four core reasons to show you just how quick our 5G will be.

MORE 5G SPECTRUM THAN ANYONE ELSE

Spectrum is the over-the-air bandwidth that mobile networks need to transmit data. And when it comes to 5G, there’s a lot of data. Thankfully, we’ve got more usable 5G spectrum than anyone else. This means our service will be faster and able to handle more data.

In fact, international ITU standards state that to deliver a 5G network, you need to have a minimum of 100MHz of 5G spectrum. Right now, we’re the only UK mobile network to have over this amount.

The technical bit

We’ve got our 5G spectrum in one large 100MHz block in the usable 3.4-3.8 GHz band, which makes it even more efficient to deploy and allows us to achieve full peak and average 5G speeds.

THE UK'S FIRST MOBILE NETWORK CLOUD-CORE

We’ve invested heavily in the UK’s first mobile network core that’ll be hosted using the Cloud. This means we’ll deliver a fully virtualised telco Cloud-core network that’s 5G ready and supported by our existing IT systems. What’s even better is that this is exclusive to us right now , and our Cloud-core network is already live. We’re migrating our customers onto it throughout 2019.

What this means

Cloud networks are more efficient and reliable than legacy solutions and allow us to handle even more data. It’ll improve reliability and resilience and help us introduce new features quicker for our customers.

OUTSTANDING DATA CENTER ARCHITECTURE

We’re rolling out a distributed network of local core edge data centres around the UK, bringing the network core closer to our customers. Wherever you are. This provides lower latency and allows us to store some content locally, both of which means you get a quicker service. These are going live as we turn on 5G later in the year.

The technical bit

Our data centres host our network, which processes our network data. We’ve recently upgraded our data centres to be next generation. Legacy data centres can be out of date, inefficient and unable to support the huge scalability required for best in class 5G. So, our new 5G core network will run from these next generation data centres.

NEXT GENERATION RADIO ACCESS NETWORK TECHNOLOGY

Introducing, our brand new Radio Access Network (RAN). We’re deploying the most advanced next-level RAN technology for 5G. Our new RAN will replace the existing one, which will give speed, capacity, coverage and performance improvements for the future.

The technical bit

RAN technology is the masts and base station equipment, and the connectivity, that links mobile traffic to our core network. We’re using mMIMO, 64T64R RAN technology with an evolved backhaul solution, that moves our transport network closer to you.

WHAT ELSE WE'VE BEEN WORKING ON

We’re delivering a next generation customer and billing support solution, which means our entire IT support will be sitting in the Cloud. This will enable us to give you the best customer service, from billing and care to network support and new products. We’ll be rolling it out throughout 2019 and 2020.

Don’t want to miss out on the latest? We’ll be keeping this article up to date with the most recent Three 5G news so, keep an eye out for updates.