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120 MHz means finding customers, not capacity, is the problem. Philip Marnick has enough spectrum to offer 5-10x the capacity of Verizon's LTE network, probably more than the total deployed by all the other British carriers combined. In theory, with good outdoor antennas that’s enough spectrum for a gigabit per cell using LTE Advanced. Intially, Marnick is deploying something closer to 60  megabits over a single 20 MHz carrier but he’s ready to quickly triple that.  

    By going to high frequencies (3.5 and 3.6 gigahertz), UKB was able to get a swath of contiguous spectrum rarely matched in the developed world. Clearwire in the U.S. has done similar and also has enough potential to change everything if the other carriers with them.

   UKB is wholesale only and the obvious first prospects will be existing carriers with a capacity crunch. They put their first towers in London and intend a “smart build” based on where they have customers. Any interested carrier can simply identify what parts of London they need more bandwidth. UKB will be able to massively increase any carrier’s capacity as fast as they can turn up the necessary towers.  

    UKB claims this is “the first TD-LTE 3.5GHz deployment in the world” and start-up problems are inevitable. Verizon, “America’s most reliable network” has recently seen three huge network outages despite using the more developed FD-LTE. What UKB has now is a “technology demonstration” although they hope to offer live service within 90 days. With TD-LTE rollouts moving fast in Australia, Russia, India and the U.S. (Clearwire), everyone will be watching the early results.

   This high capacity LTE is particularly interesting for rural areas with very slow broadband or none at all. LTE at Verizon, the largest deployment so far, is fairly reliably delivering 5-12 megabits. But first generation LTE networks, working in 10-20 MHz, have severe capacity limits and typical caps of 10-15 gigabytes, maximum. The speed is fine, but you can't watch much TV or otherwise heavily use the service. 40-60 MHz provides far more capacity, which increases more than proportionately. Rural areas are by definition low density, so the capacity for each user could be far higher.

    Hundreds of MHz are unused in virtually all rural areas, plenty for a robust mobile offering. Most places that would mean 10's of megabits of speed, dozens of gigabytes before a customer reaches the cap. What this requires is reallocating the unused spectrum to a large block for rural use. Much of the spectrum is in use in some urban areas and those who have a government monopoly for that use continue hog it even in areas they aren't using the spectrum. "Use it or lose it," as recommended by FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein and top Wall Street analyst Simon Flannery, is the obvious way to drastically improve rural broadband.