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BT’s CEO has pledged to launch 5G in the UK by the end of 2019
BT has said that it will aim to launch 5G before the end of 2019, through its mobile subsidiary EE.
"We will look to have a commercial 5G product launched in the next 18 months," BT’s CEO, Gavin Patterson, told members of the press on Tuesday.
A 5G launch in 2019 would be slightly ahead of analysts’ expectations who had predicted that 5G would arrive in the UK in the second or third quarter of 2020.
BT recently increased its annual capex budget for 5G to £3.7 billion.
BT recently spent £302 million at the UK’s 5G spectrum auction, with Patterson saying that he remained committed to investing in the UK’s mobile network architecture.
“We continue to invest for growth… securing 40MHz of 3.4GHz spectrum suitable for 5G mobile services. We are improving our customer experience across the Group, with our key metrics of Group NPS and Right First Time both strongly up. Our integration and restructuring activities remain on track. The integration of EE into BT is delivering run rate cost synergies of £290m," he said.
