I downloaded a movie in about 10 minutes from EE Film

Those who’ve been reading MIR for a while will recall that I recently bought an iPad Mini. I ordered a £15.99 monthly SIM from EE to power the connection. And when I signed up, I ticked the box to find out more about their EE Film offering.

I installed the app a few days later but only today have I actually got round to buying something from their shop (powered by FilmFlex — not sure who they are!).

I decided to buy something fairly random. I settled on the latest edition of Resident Evil. It was £2.79 and it was a rental. You can either choose to stream the movie on your iPad (other devices are available) or you can download it. That’s my preference.

Although I am seriously delighted with the fact that my iPad regularly says “LTE” instead of 3G (and that means the connection is lightning fast), I live in the middle of nowhere and the train journey to there consists of a series of network blackspots. Streaming is not an option.

So I like the ability to download — something, alas, I don’t think Tesco’s Blinkbox allows yet.

Throughout this year, anything downloaded from EE FIlm is zero rated. It doesn’t count toward your monthly data usage limit. I think mine is 6GB. I’m not sure what compression the service is using — I haven’t watched the movie yet — but I’d expect it to require at least a gigabyte, if not two.

I hit download carried on with other tasks. Before I did so, I was surprised to see the download meter hit 2% within a few moments. I looked away, did something, looked back and bam, it was at 68%. I was astonished. I looked away at some more email and boom, the download had completed.

It can’t have been more than 10 minutes. In fact I felt that it was about 5 minutes. I should have actually timed it. I’ll need to try another one and see how quickly it downloads.

Whatever the actual figure, it felt fast — and that is perhaps the ultimate requirement from a 4G network.

I downloaded it in Richmond which has very good EE 4G connectivity (along with 49 other towns and cities across the UK, by the way).

I’d expect EE to also have done some degree of caching or smart network optimisation. The fact I was downloading this particular movie can’t have been a surprise for them. It was on the front carousel of the film store app too. So I’m sure a bit of optimisation will have helped boost the speed.

I’m going to have a go watching the movie shortly. I’ll let you know how it goes.