UK operator EE used the opportunity presented by its sponsorship of the Latitude music festival to demonstrate of the potential of 3x carrier aggregation 4G.

Scott Bicheno

July 21, 2016

2 Min Read
EE shows off 3x carrier aggregation with 360° YouTube live stream

UK operator EE used the opportunity presented by its sponsorship of the Latitude music festival to demonstrate of the potential of 3x carrier aggregation 4G.

As the new official technology partner of the festival EE was able to film unsigned Glasgow band White using a 360° camera and stream the footage live to YouTube. The purpose of the exercise was to showcase its 4G network as 360° video requires an order of magnitude more data than regular video. You can see a recording of the stream below, although the 360° functionality doesn’t seem to survive the embedding process, so you might have to view it here.

“Most festivals take place in remote, less populated places so don’t necessarily have the best network infrastructure in place,” said Mat Sears, communications director at EE. “We’ve partnered with Latitude for the first time this year to install our superfast 4G network on-site and, while it was mainly used by our customers for sharing selfies and video, we thought we’d put it to the ultimate test by trialling live 360° streaming video.

“It’s still a new technology and requires huge amounts of bandwidth for the upload, but we’re always looking for new ways to demonstrate the power of our network. We hope after today’s success, and thanks to a brilliant set from White, we will be able to host a lot more content like this over our network bringing more fans closer to the action at live events.”

In other event-mobile network news mobile analytics firm RootMetrics has published the results of some venue tests it has been conducting. As well as the stadia listed below RootMetrics also did some testing at Wimbledon, with EE and Vodafone scoring highly and 02 finishing last.

Wembley Stadium

  • Overall rankings – 1st EE (97.1), 2nd Vodafone (95.5), 3rd Three (35.0) – O2 did not register a high enough score

  • EE recorded fastest median download and upload speed at 25.6 Mbps and 20.1 Mbps respectively

  • This was the second time EE had won the Data Performance Award in three visits to Wembley

O2 Arena

  • Overall rankings – 1st Vodafone (84.4), 2nd EE (52.4), 3rd O2 (38.3) – Three did not register a high enough score

  • Vodafone recorded fastest median download and upload speed at 3.5 Mbps and 2.4 Mbps respectively

  • This was the third time Vodafone had won the Data Performance Award in three visits to the O2 Arena

Stamford Bridge

  • Overall rankings – 1st EE (92.7), 2nd Vodafone (82.8) and Three (81.5), 4th O2 (55.1)

  • EE recorded fastest median download and upload speed at 11.6 Mbps and 6.6 Mbps

  • This was the inaugural test at Stamford Bridge

About the Author(s)

Scott Bicheno

As the Editorial Director of Telecoms.com, Scott oversees all editorial activity on the site and also manages the Telecoms.com Intelligence arm, which focuses on analysis and bespoke content.
Scott has been covering the mobile phone and broader technology industries for over ten years. Prior to Telecoms.com Scott was the primary smartphone specialist at industry analyst Strategy Analytics’. Before that Scott was a technology journalist, covering the PC and telecoms sectors from a business perspective.
Follow him @scottbicheno

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