Mobile Phone Technology

EE is number one mobile network within the UK, regularly coming out on top in surveys be that high speed (40Mbps), low latency (<36), or coverage by population (99%) or coverage by geographical area (94%-England, 89%-NI, 77%-Scotland, 86%-Wales)

EE was established with a merger of T-Mobile and Orange in the UK back in the 2G days when OfCOM wanted to increase the number of operators from 2 to 4. Both obtained 3G licenses and towards the end of the 3G decade, BT purchased both of these brands. They used the EE name for their 4G acquisition and later changed all their (BT) mobile operation to EE.

EE were the first company to run 4G, using their spare capacity, obtained from the merger of the T-Mobile and Orange companies, at 1800MHz. They also purchased further frequency to run 4G in the auction. They now offer 4G over most of the UK and 99% of the population.

EE were the first company to release 5G on their network (30-May-2019) in parts of the big UK cities - London, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff and Belfast. Now their 5G offerring is now available over 99% of the UK population (2025-12-31). They are using the 700Mhz, 3.4GHz / 3.6GHz bands. Earlier EE were caught up in the argument about Chinese suppliers on the 5G network which has led to them stripping out Huawei equipment from their network, at great cost.

EE is owned by BT who had previously owned some mobile phone bandwidth themselves. As part of the merger agreement to create EE, they had to release some of their bandwidth to their competitors, most notably Three.

EE, or more correctly BT, have a large share of the whole digital communications market with broadband, trunk networks, as well as their mobile network. Additionally BT has their own media operation including TV, Sports and Film. This gives BT a dominant position in this integrated market with a fear of a near monopoly. Already the "last-mile" operation of OpenReach has been split away from BT but still owned by the company.