SWANSEA: City’s university and hospitals get major mobile boost as part of £11bn upgrade scheme

Phones should work better inside Morriston and Singleton hospitals, and across both Swansea University campuses, after new mobile equipment was switched on.

VodafoneThree, which carried out the work, says people at all four sites should get faster internet and clearer calls.

There is a catch. It only applies to Vodafone and Three customers. Anyone on EE, O2 or a smaller provider sees no change.

The gain is meant to show up where phones normally fail. Crowded lecture halls. Waiting rooms. Corridors deep inside hospital buildings, where the walls swallow the signal.

That is a capacity problem more than a speed one. The new kit is built to serve far more handsets at once in the same building, which is the point at which coverage usually collapses.

The company calls the technology 5G+. It is a version of 5G that runs on its own dedicated equipment rather than sharing older 4G hardware, which is what most 5G in Britain still does.

Improved 4G has gone in alongside it at Swansea University, covering the Singleton campus and the Bay Campus on Fabian Way.

What the university wants it for

For the university, the point is research it could not run before.

Its living lab tests health, fitness and wellbeing devices on real people in real buildings, and that work depends on sensors transmitting without dropping out.

Prof Keith Lloyd, director of the National Institute for Sport and Health, said the upgrade opened up exciting opportunities for that research.

“Faster, more reliable mobile networks mean we can collect and analyse data in real time, enabling more effective innovation,” he said.

“As well as benefitting research, this upgrade has the potential to improve patient care, supporting remote monitoring and digital health services.”

VodafoneThree makes the same case for the hospitals, saying better coverage could eventually let clinicians monitor patients at home instead of bringing them in. No such service has been announced.

The wider rewiring of Swansea

Better coverage has been arriving in pieces across the city for years, funded through the Swansea Bay City Deal’s £25m digital infrastructure programme.

Shoppers and event crowds got small cell aerials on city centre lampposts, installed by Virgin Media O2 and Freshwave, to stop the network buckling on airshow and Christmas parade days.

Hospitals, schools and council buildings are being linked by a dark fibre loop reaching 36 public sector sites across Swansea and Neath Port Talbot.

Farms and villages are covered by a separate rural strand, aimed at places where laying cable would never pay for itself commercially.

Ospreys fans are next. The 5G going into the club’s redeveloped St Helen’s was due to be fully working this month, promising live replays and real-time stats on supporters’ phones.

VodafoneThree says 5G+ now reaches more than three quarters of people in Swansea, and that all of it forms part of an £11bn programme it is spending on its UK network.

Households are seeing the same on fixed lines. In April, nexfibre said 37,000 Swansea homes and businesses would get faster broadband under a £1.5m upgrade of its own.