EE’s DoubleSpeed 4G launches July 4th, new router and shared plans announced

EE has announced that its DoubleSpeed 4G LTE service will go live tomorrow, July 4th, and has also revealed the specifics for its shared plans that we’ve been waiting to hear about.

DoubleSpeed will go live in 12 towns and cities tomorrow, as opposed to the 10 which were originally planned, bumping up the download speeds to a theoretical 150Mbps. In reality we’re more likely to experience 40Mbps tops rather than that sort of break-kneck speed, but it’s still going to bring faster broadband to phones than many people have at home. DoubleSpeed will instantly work on compatible smartphones and tablets at no extra cost to current EE customers, too.

EE has also revealed a new mobile payment system in association with Mastercard, which is cleverly titled ‘Cash On Tap’. The system uses NFC technology and so will only work with smartphones which feature an NFC chip – sorry, iPhone 5 owners – and works as the name suggests. A tap of your phone on wireless payment terminal allows you to make payments of up to £20 in around 230,000 shops around the UK. First time users of Cash On Tap will get a free £10 credit, and there’s also a nifty app to help you keep track of your spends.

We suspected that shared 4G plans would prove to be as popular in the UK as they currently are in the US, and EE has spilled the beans after initially confirming the family-friendly tariffs last month. We now know that the plans will support up to 5 devices – that’s smartphones, tablets and mobile broadband dongles – with unlimited texts and calls and data allowances of up to 20GB on offer. It’ll cost an extra fiver per month to add a new device to the bill, which is a single monthly charge.

In the home EE is bringing a new router called the EE LiveBox 2, which uses the same 4G LTE connectivity and beams it out around the house to allow laptops, consoles and the like to connect and get online. This router supports the latest 802.11ac Wi-Fi technology, so it should be very nippy.

With EE’s recent coverage expansion the network now covers 55% of the UK and offers by far the fastest mobile data speeds in the country. Unfortunately holding the monopoly of 4G services in the UK means that EE can charge what it wants, but hopefully prices will start to come down as rival networks O2, Three, Vodafone and others join the 4G race later this year.