UK Getting 4G Mobile Next Year – Ofcom Selling Airwaves

We in the UK have been watching our stateside cousins bask in speedy 4G and it looks like it will soon be coming to the old country.

Ofcom have been squirreling away some handy frequencies at 800MHz and 2.6GHz but they have announced that they will soon be looking to sell those airwaves off to anyone that bids high enough.

The 4G band should make it much quicker to surf the web on your mobile – speeds will be nearer to what you currently experience with home broadband. Because of this, 4G is ideally suited for wide bandwidth data services such as video streaming, email, messenger services, GPS and mapping services and social networking sites.

This could see mobile 4G services come into action as early as 2012 (handy for the London Olympics even though you can’t take your phone into the games), pending the conclusion of a consultation on how to ensure the auction helps promote competition.

The 800MHz band comes directly from spectrum freed up by the country’s transition to digital television, and together with the 2.6GHz is equivalent to three quarters of all the mobile spectrum the UK uses today.

Expect O2, Vodafone and Everything Everywhere to be pushing to the front of the queue – Three UK will be conscious not to miss out on this I would presume… but then could it stick to being called Three?

O2 has already started to blast the capital with low frequency 3G niceness 🙂