Since yesterday, May 29, Spain is already 4G thanks to Vodafone. The operator of British origin gave a blow to effect last Monday announcing the immediate premiere of its LTE network in our country, dealing a blow to Yoigo and Orange, who will not have active coverage for their customers in 4G until next July. In this way, Vodafone is ahead of the competition and breaks with the plans it shared in February of this year, during the Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, when Paco Román, president of the company in Spain, announced that they would not deploy the LTE network until the regulator distributed the most powerful frequencies for this purpose.
" We prefer not wait to advance our strategy, " says César Cid, responsible for Vodafone 4G service in our country. "Our intention was to start at 1,800 MHz (one of the two frequencies on which the LTE network will operate in Spain), but with the intention of working at 800 MHz." In alluding to this situation, CidIt refers to the bottleneck that operators have encountered in order to start covering fourth-generation data traffic. "We would have liked to start the deployment at 800 MHz, but the frequency release factor is what has slowed down the process," he pointed out, in clear reference to the problem that will not be solved until the regulator allows that band of 800 MHz, currently used for the retransmission of some DTT channels, is intended for the mobile Internet services that telephone companies so desire.
This matter is not capricious at all. The 800 MHz network is more powerful and stable, and allows for much better indoor coverage than is possible based on the 1,800 and 2,600 MHz bands, which require more connection points. However, César Cid assures that the service that is already available in seven cities in our country (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Bilbao, Malaga and Palma de Mallorca) is completely satisfactory. "We have achieved download peaks of 132 Mbps," says the person in charge of the service at Vodafone, adding that "some television colleagues did the test to sign up by recording the process, and in a few minutes they were already downloading data at about 50 Mbps ”, Pointing out that once it worked inLTE, download rates should not be less than a range of "between 2o and 30 Mbps".
And it is that if something good has the 4G service is the speed. And not only download, which can achieve theoretical levels of up to 150 Mbps "" provided we have a ready terminal, that is, that complies with the category four standard "", but also upload. "We must not forget that with Vodafone 4G we can reach 50 Mbps, which is more than what is achieved with fiber optics." However, not only speed does LTE technology boast. Latency is another of 4G's strengths. Thanks to this, the connection time is between "six and seven times less than 3G ", which implies that from the moment we request a visit to a website, the viewing of a video on YouTubeor entering a game of an online game, until we start the activity, the period that passes is practically imperceptible. In other words, the connection is instantaneous, reducing load times until they are negligible.
These two factors, speed and latency, result in greater satisfaction on the part of the user who uses the service to access the Internet from their mobile terminal or from a computer "" using a prepared USB modem or a MiFi point "". But not only that. With the increase in speed and in the quality of reception, the possibility of viewing, for example, high definition videos translates into another factor that is already part of Vodafone's strategy: an increase in data consumption, and with this, many possibilities regarding new billing formulas. At the moment, Vodafone is not in a position to reveal the direction they plan in this regard, but the conditions that they have already expressed to access their service4G advance clues of what is to come. Currently, access to the LTE with Vodafone is free for all users who are discharged. But as of September 30 it will cost 10.89 euros per month, regardless of the data quota contracted. Only customers who have subscribed the most expensive rates (Red3, Red3 Pro and the 10 GB mobile Internet voucher) will have free bar at no additional cost. However, it remains in question what new rates Vodafone will design to benefit from the possibilities of 4G. Several scenarios are placed on the table, which include an increase in data packets, the concentration of the billing business precisely on mobile Internet traffic and the adaptation of the service for domestic environments. "We want to generate demand and traffic, adapting the price of traffic," says Cid, who called us in the coming months to find out how they will propose the strategy for the second phase of their 4G network.
This second phase also involves increasing the LTE coverage areas in Spain. This increase would not only affect the quality of coverage in cities where 4G networks can now be accessed from a ready terminal, but also in new geographical areas. But César Cid remained prudent, and did not indicate which cities would join the deployment and when they would have LTE coverage. The future of Vodafone 4G also opens to the exploitation of services that could be significantly improved thanks to the power of LTE, such as the possibility of making voice calls over IP (VoIP) of high quality and to provide domestic connection in areas where ADSL does not reach "" providing much higher transfer rates, of course "".
