Updated 7.50am
IMAGINE IF THE 3G mobile internet on your smartphone was twice as fast. That would make a difference, right? Well what about five times as fast?
Those are the sort of speeds some customers in Ireland should be able to access today when Meteor and eMobile rolls out the new 4G technology, the first operator in Ireland to launch it.
Users in Dublin, Athlone and Carlow will be able to access the service by signing up to a premium-free plan, although they will have to already have or buy a 4G/LTE ready phone and swap their old SIM for a new one. 4G dongles will also be available.
Meteor and eMobile say that the service will be available in Cork, Limerick, and Galway “over the coming weeks”, with peak speeds of between 20 to 25Mbps, although in our trial below higher speeds were reached.
We’ve made a handy gif so you can see where 2G, 3G and 4G are available:
Niall Dorrian, Director of Mobile at eircom, said the provide was “very proud” to be the first rollout of the service. It should provide a huge advantage for online mobile gaming, which requires high bandwidth connections previously only available over broadband, and for streaming films, as it will reduce buffering times.
The service uses the frequency spectrum left vacant after analogue TV signals were switched off last year.
4G is already available in several countries. Other Irish networks have the licenses and are ready to follow suit with the same technology, but just how fast is it?
Dave Ward, Mobile Product Management Team with Meteor, gave TheJournal.ie a sneak peek at the new network. To test it out, we used SpeedTest.net (available on iOS and Android).
Watch the results below (and forgive the cracked screen of this author’s phone, which is on the right).
First published 9.01pm, 25 September 2013
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