EE deploys its first 5G mini masts

It may only be a trial in seven location in the London Borough of Croydon but EE has deployed its first 5G mini-masts. They provide both 1800 MHz spectrum for 4G and 3.5 GHz for 5G with four of the locations on Croydon’s London Road and the small masts are supporting 3TB of traffic every day.

The mini-masts are small enough to install on street furniture such as old red phone kiosks, digital street hubs lampposts and other furniture where power and an Internet connection can be supplied.

EE has some 1,000 small cell sites across the UK, 400 deployed in the last year but the ones prior to these in Croydon have been using the older 4G service.

Small cells are an integral component within our mobile network, ensuring that even in the busiest places our customers have access to the full performance of the UK’s best network. To reach 1,000 deployments, including our first 5G sites, demonstrates our commitment to delivering unrivalled mobile connectivity to all four corners of the UK.

Greg McCall, Chief Networks Officer, BT Group

This is great news for Croydon – we’re delighted to be the first town in the UK to be trialling 5G small cells with EE, bringing the latest mobile connectivity to our borough. These 5G small cells will improve the network capacity in high-usage areas, giving faster download speeds for our residents, businesses and visitors..

Jason Perry, Executive Mayor of Croydon

Mini masts have been around for some years, but the older deployments where for Wi-Fi such as the City of London. Adding them to existing street furniture is also a good way to avoid increasing street clutter which has a tendency to annoy even when there is a good reason for the change to the street scene.

The small cell deployments have also happened in places like Cardiff, Dundee, Luton, Norwich and Stoke-on-Trent, as well as continuing to improve capacity in summer hotspots like Torbay and Cumbria. A lot of the emphasis is on capacity improvements, simply because mobile data usage continues to grow driven by consumption of video but also things like increasing use of 4G data in new cars.