Five time F1 World Champ Lewis Hamilton was on hand to launch Vodafone’s 5G network at the Sky Garden in London on Wednesday.
Vodafone is the second network in the UK to launch their 5G service after EE who launched at the end of May. Available across 7 UK cities, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff and Bristol, Vodafone promises to bring peak speeds of up to 1Gbps, with an average speed of 150-200Mbps.
Birkenhead, Blackpool, Bournemouth, Guildford, Newbury, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Reading, Southampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Warrington and Wolverhampton are due to go live later this year.
Phone selection is limited for now, with just the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 5G available, which is 2 less than EE’s offering.
Predictably, 5G pricing isn’t cheap, with mobile plans weighing in around the £70 per month mark for the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, with an upfront payment on the phone itself also required. This drops to around £60 if you feel like going for the Xiaomi
If you’re lucky enough to be living in an area with coverage and looking to take advantage 5G at home you can also purchase the Vodafone 5G GigaCube (Huawei 5G CPE Pro) which will act as a home broadband replacement so you can cut out the likes of Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk.
SIM Only have also taken a restructure, being able to use the 5G service at no extra cost (however speeds are limited on the cheaper plans, which sort of defeats the point).
This leaves just O2 and Three out of the big networks left to launch their 5G network, both of which have promised to be up and running by the end of 2019. It will be interesting to see if launching earlier will give Vodafone and EE the advantage, or whether it will just serve as a test bed for early adopters
Vodafone Unlimited SIM Only Plans
- Vodafone Unlimited Lite: £23 per month and offers speeds of up to 2 Mbps, with unlimited data usage.
- Vodafone Unlimited: £26 per month and offering speeds of up to 10 Mbps, without worrying about their data usage.
- Vodafone Unlimited Max: £30 per month, it gives unlimited mobile access at speeds as fast as the device and the network will allow, including 5G access